you okay, Anna? You’ve not come down for your tea.’
‘Fine,’ I shouted over the noise.
She walked in, closed the door, and opened the curtains and the window.
‘A bit of fresh air is what’s needed in here,’ she said. She sat on the edge of my bed and swiped the hair from my face. ‘What’s wrong, love?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ve plated your dinner up. I’ll leave it on the side. Just heat it up in the mike when you’re ready to come down.’
She didn’t move from the bed, was still stroking my hair.
‘Thanks.’
‘If you want to talk about it, I’m here.’
‘Hmm.’
The song ended, but it started again because I’d put it on repeat.
‘Is it your friends, Annie? Have they all ganged up on you again?’
I shook my head. That hadn’t happened in months, but it wasn’t them this time.
‘A boy?’
I shrugged, my shoulders cushioned against the pillow.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘I suppose.’
I had to blink quickly so my tears didn’t fall out of my eyes.
‘Hannah said yes to a date with him. She knew I liked him.’
In the end, I couldn’t stop the tears falling.
‘Oh, love.’
I sobbed into the pillow. Monica lay down next to me, put her arms around me, and I cried into her jumper.
‘Let it all out, sweetheart.’
We lay like that for ten minutes. The song played another two times, and I finally stopped crying.
‘He wasn’t the right one for you, that’s all. The One will come along and he’ll like you right back.’ She stood up. ‘Talk to me about it whenever you want. I’ve been there. School is tough, I know. It’ll pass quickly enough.’
Now I blink away the tears that have formed in my eyes as I hear Jack’s car pull up outside. I open the front door quietly and watch him open the boot and take out the box.
Is he being nice because he feels guilty, or because he genuinely wants to help me? Heartache sounds too indulgent when you’ve been with a person for years. I might not like Jack sometimes, but he’s my family. I love him. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t confronted him: I don’t want to hear the truth.
He’s trying hard to be quiet, so he doesn’t wake Sophie. I stand aside as he carries the box into the house as though it were a boulder. I shove my hands underneath and take it from him. It’s not that heavy at all, but I pretend it is as I lower it to the ground.
‘Careful – it’s weighty,’ he says.
‘It’s okay. I’m used to carrying boxes of books at the shop.’
It’s fifty centimetres square and painted pale blue with hand-drawn flowers all over it. It has my writing in black marker: Mother. I don’t remember writing that; it’s been years since I’ve seen it. I want Jack to leave the room, so I can look at the contents alone.
‘Well?’ he says.
‘Well?’ I repeat, in the hope he’ll take the hint, but he sits on the edge of the sofa.
I sit on the rug and lift the lid off. Straight away I see my scrapbook. It’s decorated with pictures of beaches in Tenerife from holiday brochures, models from Mizz and Woman’s Own who I thought might look like her, and The Beatles. Inside the box are the 45rpm singles Gran gave me: ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Heart of Glass’. Dad always switched the car radio off if one of those songs came on.
After Gran died, I began asking him more questions about Debbie. He gave me a telephone number, saying it was for Debbie’s old mobile. At first, I rang it every day, but there was never a reply, obviously. I used to tell the answer machine my problems, what was happening at school, how much I missed her. It only dawned on me a few years later that it can’t have been Debbie’s – she wouldn’t have had a mobile phone in 1986. It was probably one of Monica or Dad’s old numbers; there must be at least a thousand missed calls on it. I don’t want to imagine them listening to the messages I left.
‘That’s an unusual collection of pictures,’ says Jack, making me jump.
I had forgotten he was here.
‘I was a child when I decorated it.’
I shouldn’t feel embarrassed in front of him, but I do.
‘But why beaches?’ he says.
‘It’s Tenerife. It was where she was last seen.’
‘That’s a bit macabre, isn’t it? What if she was …’
He stops himself from saying what he usually says after he’s been drinking.
‘I just thought she must have really liked Tenerife,’ I say, ‘to have never come back.’
It’s like my eleven-year-old self is saying the words.
Jack gets up and heads towards the door. Before he leaves, he turns around.
‘Why didn’t you just put a picture of Debbie on it – instead of models who look like her?’
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He looks away from me and tilts his head as though pondering. He hasn’t seen the memories inside my shell box. He might have feigned interest when we first started going out, but he isn’t bothered about the details of her as a person. He would rather pontificate at length about what happened to her – as though he were discussing a murder victim on the television.
I lay everything out on the floor as I take it out of the box. The records, the scrapbook, the old cigar box Debbie decorated with seashells – half of which are chipped. I know what’s in it without opening it, but I flip the lid anyway. It’s quite pathetic really, the number of things in there: my hospital wristband, a stick of Blackpool rock – now a mass of crumbled sugar held together by a cylinder of cellophane. There’s also a pen with a moving ship and a silver pendant depicting the Virgin Mary with the words Bless This Child, threaded on a piece of pink string. Dad can’t remember buying any of the items in the box, so I like to think Debbie chose them just for me.
I open my scrapbook.
She wore flip-flops in the summer and Doc Martens boots in the winter.
She had a birthmark in the shape of Australia on the top of her leg.
She ‘couldn’t take her drink’
