LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

go to school on Monday. I wasn’t going to, but I do. Maybe it was the idea of seeing Joe – that he might be thinking the same and turn up too – but from the moment I woke up I felt sure I could do it.

      Dad says nothing when he sees me in my uniform. Maybe he doesn’t want to break the spell. He looks crumpled and hopeful, searching for something in my face. ‘You look nice,’ he says. ‘Have a good day.’ His eyes blink rapidly and the side of his thumb is bitten down. I have a sudden vision of him from long ago when his hair was longer and his smile was like a lightning flash. He’d juggle eggs before cracking them into the frying pan, never dropping a single one.

      I nod at him. ‘I’ll try.’

      I missed weeks of school after Sam died, and then there was the summer break. Since then it’s been hard to feel part of things. It’s like a roundabout you jump off when you’re little, that’s spinning too fast for you to get back on. There’s a sense of not knowing what’s changed, what happened while you were away.

      I walk to school on my own, joining the clumps of other students heading the same way, and it doesn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t bothered. Not a single person talks to me and I’m so far behind in lessons it’s embarrassing. The nervous feeling coils in my stomach but I sit still through three lessons, and then it’s lunchtime. I find Joe in the canteen. He’s sitting alone, but when he sees me the expression on his face brightens and he waves me over. I sit and watch him eat chips – dropping them into his mouth so they don’t touch the sides and sipping his Coke soundlessly. Neither of us speaks, but it doesn’t seem to matter, and gradually the scared feeling dies down.

      ‘Not eating lunch?’ he asks me suddenly, and I shake my head.

      ‘You ought to,’ he tells me, and I say I will – next time. He shrugs and nods, chewing as if he has something important to say and the food’s in his way. I wait while he swallows the last chip and gets up, slipping his bag over one shoulder.

      ‘I think,’ says Joe, ‘that we were meant to meet. That you and I will make things happen.’

      I look at him, and a shiver goes through me. ‘Hope so,’ I say.

      Joe smiles. ‘Ready for the afternoon?’ he asks me, and I think I am.

      I make it through to Friday, including a meeting with my History teacher, Mrs Rutland, who’s worried about me. She’s a tall woman with joints as knotty as balls of rope and legs so thin you think they’ll snap if she runs on them. The grapevine says her husband left her for someone else, and her eyes have that look about them that says she’s only holding things together by the fingernails. I know that look from my own mirror.

      Because she seems to care, I talk about coursework and catching up, but it’s a relief when I see Joe waiting outside the window and she lets me go. He comes all the way to the bottom of my road again and then goes off, his flash of blonde hair bobbing up and down like a buoy on the ocean.

      ‘Log on,’ he calls after me. ‘Give me fifteen minutes.’

      I watch until he disappears and then run to the top of the road, not even noticing the slope. The sky is a whiteness that seems to suck me upwards as if a lid’s been taken off the world. I take a huge gulp of it and hurry indoors, skipping past the inner shop door where Mum’s talking to a customer. I dash upstairs, turn on the computer and wait:

       ‘Hey Coo’

       ‘Hey Joe’

       ‘How’s it going?’

       ‘It’s going good, at least since I met you.’

       ‘It’s the same for me. I really like you.’

       ‘Want to go out sometime?’

       ‘Sure yes. That would be great.’

       ‘Why don’t we just get married now?’

       ‘Ha ha.’

      Well, that’s how the conversation goes in my head. Stupid, I know, and sure enough, I wait for half an hour and he doesn’t log on. People never do what they say they will. In the end I shut down and go for dinner – sausages, onion gravy and a chocolate pudding that sticks to my mouth and still tastes afterwards.

      ‘I’m glad you came straight back,’ Mum says. ‘There are some nasty things happening. I don’t think you should wander about alone just now, especially after dark.’

      ‘Why?’ I say. ‘What things?’ But she says nothing, just clears the plates, while Dad finishes the pudding, glancing up after every mouthful to smile at me. I don’t know why it annoys me but it does, so I tell them I’m going upstairs to do my homework. Dad’s face falls. I wish I knew what he wants me to do – smile back? Climb on his lap and ask for a cuddle? Sometimes I wish I could, but tonight’s not one of them. I go up and take out my books, but I can’t face it. Instead I just sit, thinking about ‘nasty things’ as if we haven’t all seen enough of those to last a lifetime. In the end I give up and go to bed, lying awake for what seems like half the night listening to the muffled sounds from downstairs and outside. It’s always like this.

      In the morning, when I turn the computer on for a quick check before I leave, there’s a message for me after all:

      JoeSteen says:

      Hi. It’s midnight – cdnt get on b4. U there?’

      JoeSteen says:

      Guess not. Sorry

      JoeSteen says:

      See you 2morrow?

      It’s nothing much, but it shows he didn’t forget. I feel a surge of energy and when I reach the kitchen, I’m smiling. ‘See you tomorrow?’ he said, and that meant today.

       5.

      Thought Diary: ‘Clinical Psychologists aim to reduce psychological distress and enhance psychological well-being. They deal with mental and physical health problems including anxiety, depression, addiction and relationship problems.’ From the Cardwell Clinic welcome pack. I think that covers everything!

      Thanks to Joe’s message it’s the first weekend for ages I haven’t wanted to be somewhere else, but after breakfast Dad bursts the bubble. It’s my day to see the psychologist and I’ve forgotten.

      ‘It’s on the wall diary,’ Dad says. ‘I couldn’t make it easier for you.’

      He could make it easier by cancelling the whole thing, but I don’t say so. I send Joe a text saying ‘have 2 go out. Maybe later’ then trail upstairs and get the Thought Diary from under my bed – where the most recent things I’ve written look so completely stupid she’s bound to know I haven’t been keeping it properly. I call her the ‘Shrink Woman’ because that sounds less scary; less like I’m actually crazy. She’s meant to help me deal with how I feel about Sam dying, but it’s a waste of time.

      My phone buzzes in my pocket as I go downstairs. It’s Joe. ‘Let go of the past – the fall is not as far as you think.’

      For a moment I wonder how he knows where I’m going, but he can’t of course. He’s just a bit mad, like me.

      ‘Good to see you smiling,’ Dad says as we drive away, so I wipe the smile off in case he thinks I’m happy.

      We never speak on the journey there. Dad listens to the radio and I sit with my head turned to the window with my eyes half-closed, trying to think of nothing while the fields drift by, dotted with horses and isolated buildings. The clinic used to be a house, I think. A big building with carved gables and gardens, but it’s no house now. When you go in and see the smart reception desk and the people sitting around in chairs,

Скачать книгу