‘I think they’ll be setting off soon. Are you sure you don’t want to come outside, just for a little bit?’
Martha pulled at her lip.
Fran tried another tack, one that gave Martha the chance to hide in plain sight. ‘It would really help if you could take a few photos of them all for me. I’m useless. I never seem to catch people right.’ She offered Martha her phone, and was pleased when the girl took it from her outstretched hand.
They walked through the house back out into the garden. The sunlight blinded them both, so that for a few seconds they saw only stars.
They were just in time. Anita was getting everyone gathered for the big group shot. There was a lot of self-conscious silliness about who should stand next to who. Anita was insistent that they had to organise themselves into a boy/girl, boy/girl sequence. Martha went down onto the grass and took her place at the end of the line of parental paparazzi. At last the kids got themselves into an ‘Anitaacceptable’ formation. The girls fussed with their hair and fiddled with the straps on their bare shoulders, and the lads buttoned up their jackets across their puffed-out chests. Behind them the balloons twisted and glinted in the still air.
At last Anita shouted, ‘Okay. Everyone ready? One, two, three… Shout “Prom”!’
A ragged chorus of ‘Prom!’ went up.
The best photos were the ones Martha took of the line disintegrating as they collapsed into each other, laughing.
Chapter 5
HARRY HAD expected it to be crap. A party in a local hotel – the bar closed, with all the weirdos and squares from school, patrolled by the Year 11 teachers – that finished at midnight: it was never going be great. And for the first hour it had been totally awkward. Everyone sitting around in their little cliques, drinking warm Coke out of plastic cups, not eating the ‘sad as hell’ buffet. Harry didn’t feel the remotest bit sad about leaving high school. He couldn’t wait to get away from the staff, the other students, the school itself, with its petty rules and high expectations. He was done with it. Period. And then the Prom King and Queen thing! That had been totally embarrassing. All that clapping and foot-stomping, like it mattered. What the hell was he supposed to do with a cardboard crown? But Tish had insisted that he wear it, had crowned him herself, a knowing smirk on her face. She had looked smoking, as always, even with the cheapo plastic tiara plonked on top of her elaborate ‘updo’.
It was all so clichéd.
But something about the spotlight and the cheering had crept up on him; that and Tish grinning and twirling and laughing with him up on the stage, mocking the whole thing even as she revelled in it, and in them. The golden couple. Prom royalty. The official seal on their position at the top of the people-pile. It was so cheesy, so naff, so childish – but also so seductive. And when the DJ started playing the bangers, it had shifted up another gear. Jess had dragged them all onto the dance floor and, before he knew it, they were all bopping around, not giving a damn. As the beat took over, Harry forgot that this was just another cheap high school prom – the scene of his last, lame moments at Raincliffe – and started to have fun.
Jake was being Jake, pogoing away quite happily in a bubble of his own sweat and excess energy – Chloe, his ‘date’, long abandoned. That was no surprise really, Chloe was pretty, but she was also a total yawn. Jake had only invited her for one reason, and even that seemed to have been forgotten. Then there was Jess and Gabbie – both barefoot – belting out the lyrics, daft grins plastered on their faces. And Mo – Mo was the real revelation. Watching him throwing shapes with nerdy Narinder was both wrong and totally hilarious.
It felt good to be at the heart of it.
When the DJ put on the power ballads at the end and the crying started, they all linked arms, forming a tight circle. Harry, Jake, Tish, Mo, Narinder, Jess and Gabbie. A sweaty bundle of mates, glued together by time and familiarity. A unit. And as the glitter ball twirled and they all swore allegiance to each other, for ever, they meant it. They were friends and always would be.
Nothing could tear them apart.
Apart from the music stopping.
The lights going on.
And the teachers calling, ‘Time’.
Chapter 6
THE NIGHT OF THE ACCIDENT
DOM’S NAME was the first to be called. It came as no surprise to the others, but it did cause a bitter spike of resentment. Why Dom? Why not them? Why should he be the first to discover what had happened to his child? The not knowing was excruciating, the waiting a test of endurance. How come Dom got to be released from such suffering before they did? But as Dom followed the nurse out of the waiting room, the others started to rationalise. Perhaps it wasn’t a good thing to be summoned first. Perhaps it was a sign of bad news. It had been impossible to deduce anything from the nurse’s composed, bland expression. Either way, as the door slowly closed, Sal had an overwhelming urge to run through it and demand to see Tish. She had as much right as Dom, didn’t she? This polite, humble patience was surely the wrong response. Perhaps it was time to start shouting and demanding action, and access. Wasn’t that what a parent should do? Fight tooth and nail to be with their child, not sit on their hands waiting to be given permission to leave the room, like obedient school children.
But the door clicked shut, and Sal found that she hadn’t moved.
The disturbance of Dom’s departure over, they went back to staring into the spaces between each other.
Dom was told that Harry was on a ward up on the fourth floor. The nurse – who seemed too old still to be working – wasn’t very forthcoming about what state he was in. As they waited for the lift, Dom held himself rigid.
The police arriving at the house had blown apart his refusal to think the worst. He’d had to reset. The policewoman had spoken slowly, calmly, clearly. A car had crashed, at speed. They believed the car to have been Harry’s. There were casualties. Harry was one of them. The occupants of the car had all been taken to St Thomas’s. Dom had listened, processing everything, saying little, building up resistance. Faced with the reality of the situation, he’d swapped his earlier defiant optimism for a realistic dark pessimism. It was better to be prepared. A full-on crash, into a brick wall, at speed. The driver would, undoubtedly, have come off worse. Dom had asked about the injuries sustained by the people in the car, specifically the driver, but the policewoman couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give him any personal information about who was involved or what state they were in. Dom had turned away from her and begun thinking through the practicalities. Martha! She was asleep. Should he wake her? And tell her what? That her brother had been in a crash, that he was in hospital, that he was injured – how badly they didn’t know. Dom went up and checked on her.
She wasn’t asleep. His conversation with the police officer must have woken her. Martha was sitting up in bed, looking bewildered. He minimised the news, said that nothing had been confirmed, but she still started crying. She scrambled out of bed and began searching for her clothes, sitting down and standing up randomly. Dom hugged her to a stop, reassured her – then lied to her – saying that she couldn’t come to the hospital with him. The reality was that he couldn’t cope with Martha and with whatever had happened to Harry, at the same time. He never had mastered the knack of parenting both his children simultaneously. He laid the blame for Martha not being able to go the hospital on the police. He promised to ring her the minute he had any news. He told her not to worry. That Harry was big and daft enough to look after himself. Then he said that he was going to drop her round at Cheryl’s on his way to the hospital, so that she didn’t have to be on her own. And, finally, he told her that she must NOT look at anything anyone was posting about the crash on social media. It was all speculation and nonsense. She nodded and promised him faithfully that she wouldn’t. He didn’t believe her. He made a mental note to ask Cheryl to monitor her phone use.