This is Tamsyn’s.
My heart had skipped when I recognised her voice. Someone from my school at our house? It felt dangerous and unsafe, as if two planets had veered off orbit and crashed into each other.
She’s here… Do you… want to see… her?
No, it’s fine—
Tamsyn!
Then he’d collapsed into one of his fits and I’d run out from my hiding place behind the door in the sitting room to make sure he was okay. Penny was eyeing my grandad with thinly veiled revulsion. I noticed he had a globule of mucus threaded with blood on his sweater. I wiped it off with my sleeve then slipped my hand into his and squeezed. I faced her, pushing back my shoulders and raising my chin. She thrust out my sweater.
I picked it up by mistake.
I gave her the evils as I took it but she didn’t notice because she’d gone back to staring at Granfer.
Thanks then.
Penny forced a tight smile and stepped backwards off the doorstep.
Mum said to say hi to yours.
Then she was gone like a dog from the traps. Penny was the only person from school who’d ever come to our house and because of this Granfer had decided she was my best friend.
‘She’s nicer than Penny,’ I said.
‘Must be… a cracker then.’ He smiled and lowered the mask and went back to the jigsaw pieces, with the sound of oxygen hissing softly in the background.
I left his room and stood outside Jago’s door. I paused to listen. I wanted to wake him so he could tell me not to worry about Granfer’s fit. He always managed to calm me. But I knew if I dragged him from sleep he’d be cross and would probably refuse to talk to me, so instead I went back into my box. I called it my box because that’s what it was. A room with only enough space for a bed and a small bedside table. The door didn’t open fully and hit the bed before it was even halfway. There was a shelf that ran around the top of the room which Dad had made before I was born when they decided to use the box room for my cot rather than make Jago share with a baby. It held my clothes and although I could only get to it if I stood on my bed it was fine as long as I kept them in neat folded piles. My underwear was under the bed in a wooden crate that had once held oranges from Spain, and beside it was another box which contained all my other bits and pieces including my scrapbook.
I slid the box out and retrieved the scrapbook then sat cross-legged on the bed and slowly leafed through it. There was the yellowed newspaper cutting that made the announcement of the date and time his memorial plaque was to be unveiled at the RNLI station in Sennen. Then the small red flower I’d picked from a bush at the churchyard on the day we buried him, which was now dry and crispy. There were photographs too. One of me on his shoulders, his hands clasping my ankles, the remains of an ice cream smudged over my face. My favourite was the one of me and Jago, arms around each other, heads tipped close with Dad behind us, all posing beside the sandcastle we’d built and smiling at Mum behind the camera. Three sets of happy eyes squinting into the sunshine.
I made the scrapbook when I was twelve. Nineteen months and twenty-three days after he died. Mum had taken me to the Cape surgery, desperate for anything which might help me sleep through the night.
She has nightmares.
Mum had paused and rubbed her face hard, tears welling in her exhausted, bloodshot eyes.
The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall and cleared his throat impatiently. He leant forward, elbows on knees, close enough to suffocate me with his nasty aftershave and told me to fill a scrapbook with things which reminded me of Dad. Happy things. Memories. Mum was unconvinced and grumbled about the quack doctor all the way to Ted’s as I jogged to keep up with her. But she did as she was told and bought a scrapbook made of coloured sugar-paper and a glue stick. It didn’t stop my nightmares but I loved making it and when I felt tense it definitely calmed me. I was glad the doctor suggested it.
My brother’s door creaked open and I heard his footsteps going towards the bathroom. I closed the book and slipped it beneath my pillow for later, then went into his room. I sat on his unmade bed – still warm from his body and smelling of cigarettes and unwashed sheets – to wait for him.
‘Morning, half-pint,’ he said as he came back in, hair ruffled, eyes gummed up with sleep.
‘You know it’s after lunchtime, don’t you?’
He ignored my comment. ‘First day of the holidays?’
I nodded.
‘Bored already?’
‘No.’ I reached for the copy of Playboy which lay on the chest of drawers beside his bed and idly flicked through it while he dressed. I paused to look at a dark-haired girl with wet lips the colour of bubblegum who splayed her legs to reveal her privates without any shame at all.
‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘Not leaving much to the imagination is she?’
‘Get off that,’ he snapped, as his head emerged from his faded AC/DC T-shirt. He snatched it from me then opened his top drawer and stuffed it under his pants and socks.
‘Why do you want to look at pictures like that anyway?’
‘I don’t look at the pictures. I buy it for the stories and articles.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, right.’
His irritation slipped for a second or two to reveal a brief smile. He smiled so rarely these days which was such a shame because when he did it made his eyes sparkle and he looked even more handsome. His eyes were definitely one of his best features. They were hazel, and the exact same shade as his hair. Colour-coordinated, according to Mum. But they were nearly always dulled by sadness. Laughter replaced by melancholy. His spirit sucked out, leaving just the pretty packaging. Dad dying was bad enough, but then the mine closed and took his job and in the months since then he hadn’t been able to find work. The guilt bore down on him. Dad had been big on work and responsibility, believed with passion that everybody should pay their own way in the world.
Graft, he called it.
Graft. That’s all I expect. You can’t hold your head up if you’re not willing to graft.
Mum had tried to hide her fear when Jago told her the mine was done for. White faced, she’d sat at the table and leafed through the red-topped bills to work out which ones needed paying soonest.
It’ll be okay, love. You’ll get another job soon. I know you will.
Wracked by the weight of responsibility, his face had fallen. I’d seen that look on him before. The day after our father died. I’d walked into the kitchen and found him huddled on the floor with his arms clutched around his legs and his cheeks stained with dirty tear-tracks. I was ten, mad with hunger, and even though I’d knocked and knocked, Mum hadn’t come out of her room. I told him I was starving but he didn’t reply. He didn’t even move, not a muscle, and it scared me. It was as if he and Mum had stopped working. As if their batteries had run out.
Jago?
I knelt down next to him and put my hand on his knee.
Jago? Can you hear me? It’s like rats gnawing my belly up.
Maybe it was because I used Dad’s words – what he used to say to us when we were starving hungry – because Jago seemed to click back on. He turned to look at me and I could see his brain whirring behind his eyes. Then he gave a purposeful nod and stood. I sat on the floor, stomach rumbling, and watched him silently walk to the cupboard and get out a pan. Then he took a wooden spoon from the drawer and three eggs from the rack, and set about scrambling them, cracking each into a mug and whisking them with the fork. After he’d heated the eggs on the gas he tipped them onto a slice of toast on a plate and put the plate on the table