I daren’t put my fingers anywhere close. In the past, Grace has been like: ‘Seriously, Iz, no one’s ever gonna please you if you can’t please yourself ’. And it wasn’t like I didn’t get it, but Daniel never knocks so it wasn’t easy in my room, in my bed, so the shower’s been where I’ve, you know…But this shower, this one right now, is fucking awful, like, really fucking awful, cos it’s not getting rid of anything except that one stupid hope I grew here that maybe there was some good in my body, that maybe it wasn’t such a big fat dirty waste of space after all.
By the time I’m done and standing naked in front of the mirror, the skin on my chest is as pink as my gums. I have to twist my tongue slightly to slip its tip into the gap between my two front teeth. They came in not long after the Callisto incident, Mrs Taylor using their emergence as a reminder to Grace that me and my body could cope on our own and Grace didn’t need to constantly poke her nose (or her finger) into my business. But remembering the photos Jacob has of me on his phone, I’m starting to think Mrs Taylor had no goddamn idea.
TWELVE
It’s not like I want 2 spend the night with u, Izzy. Make it 6.
Thing is, I normally run everything by Grace. And I mean everything. But when I call her, just the sound of her hello is a pair of rolling eyes, like, honestly, Iz, we said tomorrow and you’re really phoning me now?
‘My bad,’ I tell her. ‘I totally forgot you were busy.’
What I really want is for that deep symbiotic connection she swears we live by to kick in so she’ll remember to act like my Grace and do the fussing and the organising and the tending I mock but love her for. But, after checking I’m still all right to cover for her tonight while she and Nell go take two on the jiggy in Margate, all she says is ‘cool’ then she DMs me a blowing-kisses emoji, which I copycat reply with two Xs (‘one for you, one for Nell’), because it’s better to be kind than to be honest, right?
I should know not to wait right outside the bathroom, where the big bulk of me casts looming shadows across the tiles as soon as Mum opens the door.
‘Isabel!’ she says, relief saturating her face when she clocks it’s only me, and I wonder, nothing new in the thought, if there’s pleasure in it for Daniel, in this skill he has of making our hearts snap like twigs with just the idea of him entering a room.
Then he too is on the landing, saying nothing but saying everything, his hand gesturing me first use of the bathroom, his right eye winking as he has enough of my indecision and goes ahead, closing the door behind him, Mum’s exhale perfectly timed with the bolt of the lock on the other side.
It’s weird, the power of his silence, how calm it can be, and then how fierce. His ability to shift the atmosphere so everyone breathes in his fog. It wasn’t always like this. Or maybe it was, maybe Daniel’s always atmosphered, only maybe at the beginning the mood he set for us was golden. What I mean is, those first few years are coated in a sort of happy haze, which made a fact of Daniel’s love for Mum and me as he placed us at the centre of his universe. Daniel was everything; I heard Mum say as much on the phone to Becky after she came home from a date with him one night, this glow to her face I hadn’t seen before, like she’d been showered in glitter and coated in shine.
I’d met Daniel for the first time the following week when he took us to Pizza Express, arriving with a bouquet for Mum and a posy for me, which sounds kind of naff, I guess, but it really wasn’t. It was magic, the way he made the two of us walk on air.
‘Isabel,’ Mum says now, her voice so quiet it’s practically Braille, taking me by my hand to my bedroom, like I’m five and she’s about to tuck me in.
And I wonder if this is it, if the noise of Daniel’s shower is enough cover to let her speak, to tell me something, anything, about that weird shit with the pregnancy test or to ask me about that other weirder shit with Daniel’s hands. I’m sure she must have noticed. How the space between us has got narrower. How whatever makes him raise those hands at Mum is making him place them so differently on me. Not as hard, but just as bruising, right?
And I must look at her, like, ask me and I’ll tell you, cos ‘Not now,’ she says. Then she whispers, like it’s everything, ‘Destination moon?’
It’s what she’d say when I was little, after George Clooney, the real one, was on Desert Island Discs. Mum’s excitement about his upcoming appearance must have been catching; I jumped on the sofa with a joy so solid it carved my very first memory upon my brain.
Obviously I didn’t realise at the time that, at just nineteen, Mum was young to be on her own in a town with no family but her three-year-old daughter, young to be spending her nights watching American hospital dramas and her weekends listening to Desert Island Discs, young to have so much responsibility binding her down. And obviously I didn’t realise at the time that, at just nineteen, when she listened to one of George Clooney’s choices, Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, she may well have felt the song was her perfect fit. It would explain the tears, I guess. And maybe what came later, with Daniel too.
I may have been three, but I fell in love with George Clooney that Sunday when we first heard him. Maybe it was his voice, which had a quiet happiness to it, but, really, I think it was what he gave me with his third record: Dinah Washington’s ‘Destination Moon’. When I listen now, the love in it sounds romantic, but back then, it summed up my relationship with Mum. She made my cares disposable; we could jump in a cardboard-box rocket and leave them far below, because, like space, Mum and her hope seemed endless, and in loving me so fully, she made possibilities seem endless too. After George Clooney Sunday, whenever I panicked about fallen block towers or times tables or some squabble with Grace over which of us could do the best roly-poly, Mum would take me by the hand and suggest we head for ‘destination moon’. ‘It’ll be fine up there,’ she’d say, and I’d believe her.
‘We can’t even see the moon,’ I say to her now, pointing at the window, still framing a bright blue and starless sky.
I may as well have slapped her. Sorry but not sorry enough, I open it for the fresh blast of air which stops us both from melting, as the lava of everything we’re not saying creeps around our feet, pushing me out of my room, out of the house and on to my phone.
Tick tock, Fingers, says the message from Jacob.
On my way, I reply, the insides of me erupting with earthy volcanic rage.
THIRTEEN
‘Sorry? What?’ My head’s down, eyes to the pavement, avoiding the sky, when Max stops me on the street one away from Jacob’s, whatever he was saying blocked by the music in my earphones.
‘You’re actually doing it then?’ Max says for the second time, and he can’t be talking about what I think he’s talking about, so I just shrug, like, huh, and he literally puts into words the thing even Jacob was too polite to name. ‘Sleeping with him,’ he says, voice like an awkward laugh at some politically incorrect comedian. ‘With Jacob!’ And he shakes his head then, like Jacob’s only gone and pulled this off. ‘You know he didn’t actually have any photos other than that first Fingers one.’ He doesn’t even stumble over ‘Fingers’, like all this is just a normal part of everyone’s vocabulary now.