place in the house, the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you were thinking you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again.
Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel.
Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of Scarborough Fair so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch out on his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next.
Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother.
I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great Auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice) and the people on Newsround, but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper aeroplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers.
It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice.
She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter with Mummy?” and I said she was sad.
She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot. Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.”
I said, “He’s dead, Stroma. He’s never coming back.”
I could feel this weight, this downward pressure in my head, and I thought it was possible I could cave in or implode because I just said that out loud.
Stroma was quiet for a minute, and then she sighed and looked right at me and said, “Can I have something to eat now? I’m starving.”
And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her.
I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma carried on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me too.
Believe it or not, school was one of my favourite places back then. Everywhere else seemed like hard work, so school was a distraction. I didn’t have to worry about where Stroma was. I didn’t have to handle Mum. I didn’t have to think about the obvious unless I wanted to.
The gap Jack left there got filled pretty quickly by someone else clever and good at running and a bit of a flirt. It was like a day off. Because of course that didn’t happen at home. There was no room for anything else. I sometimes thought that if Jack was looking down on us all, he’d be feeling majorly hassled, not free to enjoy the afterlife at all.
I think Mum and Dad drove each other crazy with it in the end. They stopped talking altogether about three months before Dad moved out. There was this odd, loaded quiet around them. We kept out of their way.
Maybe they split up because of Jack, because when they looked at each other they only saw him.
Maybe they blamed one another for stuff.
Maybe they were headed that way already. Maybe him dying kept them together a bit longer. I have no idea.
When Dad finally came clean about leaving, he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. He’d been staying on sofas for a while, pretending he was at the office, basically avoiding us. He needn’t have bothered to pluck up the courage to break old news. Even Stroma had worked that one out, aged five.
He was gone a long time before he was gone, if you know what I mean. And when he left, things just got worse. Because we had him to miss too.
So anyway, school was like a holiday, if you can imagine that.
I don’t know how I’d overlooked Bee there before, because after that day she spoke to me, she was the first face I saw in any crowd. It didn’t matter who I was with, I’d suddenly be aware that she was around. It was like a special light went on that made her easy to find.
The thing is, once you start looking at Bee you almost have to tell yourself to stop. We aren’t so different on paper: same height, same colouring maybe, at a stretch. But Bee has something I don’t. Her skin and hair are different shades of the same honey. The way she holds herself is so precise and effortless and graceful I still wonder how she does it. And it isn’t just me who thinks that. I see other people watching her all the time, trying to work out how come they aren’t put together the same way Bee is.
It was after school the next time I bumped into her and she acted all surprised, but I had this quiet feeling she’d been waiting for me. I had to pick up Stroma and Bee said did we want to get an ice cream or something.
We went to this place at the top of Chalk Farm Road that’s been there forever. They sell cones out of a window on the street or you can go in and have sundaes in tall glasses and scoops in a silver cup. Stroma sat on Bee’s lap, even though there were about thirty-nine free chairs in there. She was chatting away about some boy in her class called Carl Dean who cut a hole in his shirt on purpose, with scissors, because he needed that exact colour for his collage. She was making us laugh without even trying.
I’d been remembering the birthday party we had there, me and Jack, when he was nine and I was seven. I thought about all the kids who’d come and where they were now, and if any of them remembered Jack or knew he was dead or even minded. I was wondering which chair he had sat on then, and if it was the one I was sitting on now.
It was cool and quiet and empty in the shop. I saw a crowd from my class go past the window, yelling, dancing, drawing attention to themselves. Another day that would’ve been me, but right then I was glad to be hidden away at a marble table with a girl who said things I hadn’t heard ten times before. We finished off Stroma’s mint choc chip when she’d had enough. Bee tried to make an origami swan out of her napkin and failed. We looked at the pictures on the wall – signed photos of celebrities nobody’d ever heard of. When the waitress took Stroma off to get more free wafers, Bee asked me if I’d thought any more about the negative.
I hadn’t, not
