‘Izzy! Izzy!’
Jacob.
I hadn’t realised quite how much I never wanted to hear him say my name again. But he’s here. Saying it. And not quietly either. When I open my bedroom window, he looks up, grinning like those boys in Hollywood movies who’ve thrown stones to get their wannabe girlfriend’s attention.
‘How do you even know where I liv—’
‘Max. Walked you home, didn’t he? The night of the,’ Jacob wiggles his fingers, grins.
‘Please.’ My eyes flit from him to the crack between my door and the carpet, willing it to stay black, because light would mean movement would mean Daniel would mean a different kind of dark.
‘Please what, Izzy?’ Jacob’s voice is all game on for some bants, and his eyes are too bright, too lively, too much like what’s happening now – and whatever that was, there in his room on his bed – is a game. ‘Chill, yeah,’ he says, as if I should know that I obviously have no choice but to play. ‘Brought you this.’ And he’s waving what looks like a phone. ‘You must have dropped it when we…’ So Jacob doesn’t know what to call it either. ‘Whatever, eh. Sent you some nice mementos to keep on here, Fingers. You wanna be careful where you leave it. Prying eyes and all that. You gonna come down?’
‘Please.’ He’s too loud.
‘Aw, babe. You want me to come up, is that it?’ All those cocksure moves of his are as bold as his volume, which is too much. And I’m telling him no, but he didn’t hear it before and he doesn’t hear it now because there’s a flick and a thud thud thud, the front door is swinging open and, in the light of the moon, Daniel’s up in Jacob’s face, hand on his shoulder with a fix that’s all one wrong move, son…
‘Are you OK, Isabel?’ Daniel’s eyes are on Jacob, his voice level but spiked with that stay-away-from-my-daughter line dads always deliver in those Hollywood movies with those stone-throwing boys.
‘Sorry, Mr Chambers,’ Jacob says, ‘for disturbing you.’
Daniel remains steady, refusing to fill the gaps.
‘I was bringing this back for Izzy.’
My heart capsizes, any hope tipping out of it as Jacob shows him the phone.
‘Thought this –’ he bucks his chin at my window – ‘would be quieter than ringing the bell.’
Silence.
‘Obviously not though, eh? Sorry.’
‘Just go,’ I want to tell Jacob. ‘Please. Just stop talking and go.’
Daniel removes his hand from Jacob’s shoulder, takes my phone, the mementos, whatever they are, folded into his palm as he tells Jacob, ‘Off you trot then, mate’, his Ts like his smile, which is like paper, flat but with those edges that can be painfully sharp.
‘You stay where you are, Isabel,’ Daniel says.
And Jacob, whose back is to Daniel now, practically glows in the white of the streetlight as he drops his sorry-Mr-Chambers face and quickly presses his tongue in and out of his cheek. ‘See you soon, Izzy!’
‘Shut that window,’ Daniel says to me. ‘Now!’
The room shrinks when I close it. And then again when I hear him on the stairs.
I don’t take it down, but I touch it, the Jar of Sunshine, fingers slipping from its lid as Daniel comes into my room.
‘Jesus, Isabel, it’s eleven thirty. Do you not have any consideration for your mother? For me? Here,’ he says, a softer tone as he moves to where I’m standing by the wardrobe, his hand on my back a gentle press towards my bed.
Don’t make me sit, I think. The give of the mattress always feels too easy when Daniel kisses me goodnight.
‘You’d better have this, I suppose.’ He holds out my phone.
But I don’t want it, not really. Not the mementos anyway. I can’t let him keep it though, so I reach across and his fingers brush mine and he tells me, ‘You need to be careful, Isabel. Remember what I said about saving yourself for someone special.’
When my stepdad’s lips press a little too long on my cheek, there’s some sick part of me that’s relieved Jacob took what he did. That it’s done. That it’s no longer yet another thing Daniel can take or do. That whatever he does, he’s too late for that at least.
Cos that’s gone.
EIGHT
The morning sunshine stabbing at the dark of my bedroom is wrong. It doesn’t fit with the cold that hit me when I woke. When I remembered.
‘Isabel,’ Daniel calls, and it’s clear from his voice it’s a sergeant major’s summons, that he’s not coming to me, so I go down to the kitchen, where he points at the seat at the breakfast bar next to Mum, saying he wasn’t going to do this now, but he doesn’t see what choice he has. ‘Given the circumstances,’ he says.
And I wonder if he knows – if, in the time it took for him to come in from the street and go up to my room, he somehow saw the mementos on my phone.
I’ve deleted them obviously. But they’re stuck. In my head. This kaleidoscope of images that just keeps turning and turning, this permanent feed of Jacob and me, Jacob and me, Jacob and me. All on his monument bed. Starting with us sitting on it, his mouth totally ‘cheese’ while mine is totally straight. That picture I could cope with. But the others. It was one thing being there, but seeing it like that, from this different perspective, seeing me there, laid down, eyes closed, legs open – well, it’s another opinion, isn’t it? A third-party view. And even to me, who was there, who felt it so much I had to stop feeling at all, even to me, in those kaleidoscopic pictures, it looks like I could be game on. There’s no battle is what I mean. That Izzy Chambers in the picture? She is flat. Passive. Scum.
Daniel’s staring, his chest staying puffed out despite the long exhale of frustration as he makes his way round to the kitchen-counter side of the breakfast bar, his left slipper squeaking with every step. He removes and examines it, takes some superglue from the drawer and squeezes the liquid carefully between the upper and the sole, pinching the two parts together while whistling ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. And I swear I loathe him more than ever because that song belongs to me and Grace. She sang it as she filled my jar with the beads of my torn-apart necklace and promised with the lyrics and her heart that there would always be light in the broken pieces, and said that I should never, ever doubt that I was loved.
Daniel whistling our tune feels like theft. Or like he knows somehow that Grace’s friendship is as fragile as everything else in my life right now.
‘I was going to chat to you about this later,’ he says, ‘but now seems as good a time as any. What with that boy turning up late last night.’ He looks at Mum, like, you see? You see what your daughter’s become? And the kaleidoscope of images from last night keeps turning as Daniel keeps staring and I keep sinking into this soiled cauldron of hate.
Turning.
Staring.
Sinking.
Turning.
Staring.
Sinking.
The wait is a needle drawing blood, my head whirling like I’m gonna pass out.
‘It wasn’t even the same boy, was it, Isabel? As the one I saw you with the other day?’ He turns to Mum, who’s reaching for a second piece of toast when Daniel slaps her hand away. ‘What is it with you, Stephanie? You’ve been eating like a horse. Good job you’ve got me to keep you in check, eh?’ He lifts her hand to his mouth, his lips pressing into the slap mark.