casa su casa’ actually means—”
She cuts me off, pointedly blowing a bubble in my direction. “Does when I say it. What about your mum?”
“Useless. Everything she says about when she was young contradicts everything else. All I know is, she lived in London, she was going to be the next Kate Moss and then…”
POP.
“Have you ever just, like asked? WHO IS MY FATHER?”
“I can’t.”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“I just kind of…can’t. She doesn’t want me to.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.”
“OK, dude. I’m on board. We now have two projects. Operation Awesome and Operation Who’s-the-Daddy?” She grins. I frown at her.
“Do we have to call it that?”
“Yes,” she says finally, before unfurling a bubble the size of a space-hopper between us. We get my MP3 player out of my bag and take a headphone each. I scroll through to a really old album I just discovered. Marquee Moon by Television. Apparently they are the band who invented punk, which is funny because they totally look like teachers. My favourite track comes on, Friction. Tom Verlaine starts screaming, “I don’t wanna grow up/There’s too much contradiction!” and looking up at the sky I feel like gravity could just switch off and I could step out into it. In my other ear the sea keeps breathing. Wave. Wave. Wave. Keep trying.
On the bus back, I think about Mum crying sometimes when I was little. Wet eyes and a big smile on my birthday. Hiding it but not very well. I heard her at night sometimes, through the bedroom wall. The day after something bad had happened, when she wouldn’t get up. She always said it was a headache but I stopped believing that ages ago. The answer I need is underneath those tears. I have always known not to ask. About any of it. Suddenly it strikes me that I haven’t heard her cry for a while. Definitely not since…I push the thought back down. He’s an idiot. And he’s not my dad.
The bus drops us back at the stop outside The Blue. It’s quarter past three and already it’s beginning to get dark. Navy spreads through the empty sky like ink in water. Hol fluffs her hair with the back of her hand and stares into the dimly lit café window, half at her own reflection, half through it trying to catch a glimpse of Dan Ashton. “Want to come to mine?”
“Nah. I’d better go home.”
My stomach gives a little lurch at the thought. Holly notices and gives me another conciliatory pat.
“OK soldier. Listen, tomorrow we begin a new phase. We have a name. We are the Broken Biscuits. I think it’s time Operation Awesome went overground.”
“Meaning?”
“We start recruiting. This isn’t a two-woman operation. We need band members. At least two more.”
I salute. “Yes sir.”
I hug Hol and watch her stride away purposefully. I suppose I’d better get home before anyone notices I’m gone.
I arrive back to an empty house. Mum is still down in the salon and Ray…he’s probably teaching some business-dude to pretend he’s a tiger so he can go in and ‘kill it’ at his presentation tomorrow. Lame-a-rama. I try to imagine him actually living here, bursting through the door with a “Honey, I’m home!” every evening, like a character from a bad sitcom. It’s the end. No more TV nights, lounging around in our pyjamas watching films. No more Pizza Wednesdays. No more Mum practising salon treatments on the pair of us, candles and wine glass balanced on the side of the bath; The Pixies on the stereo. The bathroom will probably stink now. Man-stink. In fact that’s the best way to describe Ray’s arrival – a bad smell emanating through the house. Everything looks the same, but the whole place reeks. The flowers sit on the table from breakfast, smiling out at the kitchen with the stupid optimism of things that don’t even know they’ve been hacked down and will soon be dead. Stupid flowers. Stupid tablecloth.
I stagger up into my room, overcome by a weary mix of misery and powerlessness. I kick off my trainers and flop down on to the bed. The clock-radio blinks 15:55. I blink back. Once, twice and then fall headfirst into a black-hole sleep, the deepest I have ever known.
When I wake again it is almost midnight and the house is enveloped in velvety darkness. A glass of juice and a sandwich sit outside my bedroom door. I pick them up and tiptoe down from my little attic room to the floor below. The door is ajar. I call Mum’s room ‘The Museum’ because everything in it is about a hundred years old. It being hers, none of it in any way goes together. Ancient floral quilts clash with old leopard-print lampshades. Twinkling Indian saris frame the window and a costume shop array of frocks are slung willy-nilly over a battered Chinese screen. In the middle of it all is Mum asleep on her bed in a pool of lamplight. Dark hair framing her beautiful face, long eyelashes flickering mid-dream, the gentle rise and fall of Brides magazine on her chest. If she hadn’t been snoring it would have been just like an advert.
I sit on the third stair and eat my sandwich, drink my OJ and watch her sleeping. I can feel the fact of her engagement (sounds so weird – she’s thirty-five!) sitting in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold – a boulder thrown into a lake, the surface of which has now become calm. I think about her almost-crying this morning “Don’t I deserve some happiness?” Like she’d never had any until now. Was life really so unbearable when all we had was each other?
After eating, I walk into the room to turn off her light. She doesn’t look too much like me. Her eyes are brown and mine are green. I suppose our cheekbones are the same. Sticky-outy – but hers make her look like a film star, whereas mine make me look like an alien. Her hair is smooth and unfurls itself like a shampoo ad when she takes it down. Mine seems to defy gravity and if it has been in a ponytail it stays there when you take the elastic out. Wondering if anything about me will ever make sense, I flick off the bedside lamp and sneak out, leaving Mum snuffling away contentedly in the darkness.
4 The Beast and the Godbrother
A feeling of numb calm stays with me for the next few days, punctuated by sickening moments when I remember that the world as I know it is about to end. In science I draw Ray’s face on the textbook illustration of the meteor that caused the Big Bang hurtling towards earth. The dinosaurs were lucky – they didn’t know what was coming to take them out. Then I start daydreaming about my real father (who Hol and I have christened BioDad). Maybe he’s a film star! Mum’s always telling stories about the flash company she was in down in London. “He could be Johnny Depp or Clive Owen,” I suggest to Hol at lunchtime, “maybe even Daniel Craig! James Bond could be my dad!”
“Dude, BioDad is so not James Bond. Judging by the way you’re turning out, he’s more likely to be some freaky brainiac who’s in the jungle looking for a cure for cancer or locked in a laboratory building robots that can, like, think for themselves and do wees and stuff.”
“Why would anybody invent a robot that can do wees?” I ask incredulously.
“I’m just saying…who knows why these scientists do what they do. Anyway,
