‘There’s a name for girls like you, Isabel.’ His face is a storm, like that one in The Wizard of Oz that lifts Dorothy right out of Kansas. Only, Daniel’s twister doesn’t drop anyone in Oz; it leaves you spinning in the dark, where the familiar sky turns to thin ice and you end up literally shaking.
And I look at Mum, who’ll only look at the wall.
He must have seen the pictures. He must somehow know what I’ve done.
‘I got you this,’ he says.
And if Mum’s been eating like a horse, she now looks as if she’s about to bolt like one. Daniel’s holding a pregnancy test. The way he holds it makes it look like a weapon.
‘Daniel, I —’ Mum starts but is cut off by her husband’s finger drawing a sharp stop line through the air, which must be too thin for breathing; Mum seems unable to exhale.
‘This is nothing to do with you, Stephanie,’ he says. ‘This is between Isabel and me.’
And out it comes then, all Mum’s held-in breath, Daniel too busy sliding the test towards me to notice the release in her.
‘I made this point only yesterday, Isabel: do you really want to end up a teenage mother like her?’ His voice has ratcheted up a notch, like one of those air-raid sirens in the war. ‘I got you this as a reminder.’ He’s so quiet now. So calm. ‘Of how terribly things can work out for silly little girls who do silly little things.’ He looks from me to Mum. ‘Though I thought your own existence would be reminder enough.’ He laughs.
It’s not like Mum laughs too, but her face? And that sudden easing of her breath? There’s relief in it, I’m sure. And I get it, because I’ve felt the same when Jacob’s picked on Grace instead of me. But really? My own mum?
‘I’m just trying to help,’ he says in that same over-rehearsed voice he uses to run his lines.
‘I don’t need your help.’ I might be saying it to Daniel, but I’m staring at Mum. I need yours though, I shout, not aloud, obviously. But there’s something in her eyes that tells me she knows. Shit lot of good it does me, but she knows.
‘Oh, you need my help all right, Isabel.’
If Daniel knew how little he looks like George Clooney when he’s angry, I wonder whether he’d change.
‘You both do.’ He smiles then, cool and almost disinterested. ‘Where would you be without me?’ His arms make a cocoon around my mother. ‘Same place I’d be without you…’ His kisses on her neck so tender, so light. ‘Lost,’ he says with all that George Clooney charm.
And then he’s gone.
‘I love you,’ Mum mouths. Then, at a volume intended to reach Daniel where he’s now climbing the stairs, she says, ‘Right, crumpets for breakfast?’
If I thought it would make any difference, I would scream.
NINE
What the actual? Mum’s literally making crumpets. I can smell them from my room. Like crumpets are what we need right now. Seriously? Aren’t they just going to rile Daniel and make us fat? Make us hate ourselves even more than we do already? And I’d say all that, but I swear there’s no point. All I’d get is that wall. The one she makes of whispers. All that Not right now, Isabel. Later, Isabel. I’m really sorry, Isabel, but I know that’d be the end of it, cos Daniel would come in and the whispering would turn to silence and any hope of a proper conversation would turn to fear.
So, she’s making crumpets and surely she must know that I don’t need crumpets right now. I need her.
But you know what? In the absence of Mum I need Grace. You see, the thing with Grace is that she’s sound when I’m not. Because when the home stuff gets too much and I feel like I’m gonna lose my shit, she has this way, without even knowing what’s caused the explosion, of gathering it back in. She’s like a seventeen-year-old-girl-sized version of my Jar of Sunshine, only louder, more decisive and better on the phone.
Today though, she’s not picking up, not the first three times I call her at least, and when she does finally answer, it’s clear from the elongated, quiet-for-Grace ‘Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzyyyyy’ that she’s priming me for bad news. ‘I know we were supposed to be meeting up this morning but…would you mind…’ she says.
I know that I will but I won’t say that obviously, because minding doesn’t change things; it just pisses people off.
‘I absolutely promise to make it up to you.’
Before she even has the chance to break my heart, I break it for her. ‘You’re spending the day with Nell, aren’t you?’
‘Not just the day, if you agree to cover,’ she says. ‘Plllllleeeeeeeeaaaasssse.’ And her voice when she asks me to help her have hours in bed with her girlfriend is really no different than it was when she was eight and talking me into lending her my singing and dancing Elmo. ‘Nell’s parents are away the entire weekend and she’s planning this amazing dinner with candles and one of those chocolate puddings they eat on First Dates – you know, those melty ones that literally look like sex on a plate.’
I know this morning’s shower will have got rid of them, but I swear I can still feel the greasy crumbs of Monster Munch on my skin. Totally un-amazing. Totally not sex on a plate.
‘I’ve spun Mum this line about an English project. You’ll do it, won’t you? Say I’m at yours? That we’re working on it together tonight if she calls?’
When do I ever say anything but yes to Grace?
‘Sure.’
‘Iz?’ And her voice is some kind of metal detector. ‘You are all right, aren’t you?’
I could tell her. About Daniel. Jacob. All of it. Everything I’ve never mentioned because revelations are like bodies, right? One thing leads to another and before you know it, you’re baring all. And I swear it’s getting too much, all of this keeping stuff in. Like one more secret and, seriously, I’m gonna go bang.
‘The thing is —’ I say.
But Grace is all hold that thought. And she’s really, really sorry, but Nell’s on the other line and she’s gotta go, but she’ll call me back when she can, and I mustn’t forget that if her mum phones, she’s with me, yeah?
‘Wish me luck! ’ she says, even though we both know she doesn’t need it.
Will I see you tomorrow? I message her after she’s hung up.
And she replies with a thumbs-up and a heart emoji, which is cool, but I know how time tempers things, how all those moments with Mum and Daniel which have been top of my Must Tell Grace pile have slipped into Can’t Tell Grace because every normal hour in their aftermath weighs down the idea of talking with this colossal sense of betrayal or shame.
And then there’s a fear of Grace disbelieving me too. About Jacob. Cos I walked into his house. I went up to his bedroom. I lay down. Those pictures are proof, right, and I may have deleted them, but he has copies too.
And Daniel? Would Grace believe what I could tell her about him? Because Daniel isn’t the kind of man to do these things. Not George-Clooney Daniel who proposed to my mum with a flash-mob dance to Bruno Mars’s ‘Marry You’ in the thrum of Whitstable harbour. I was in on it, carried the roses while he carried the ring. ‘It was so perfect,’ Mum’s best mate Becky gushed in the months after, before she stopped being invited over for coffee or wine.