CHAPTER ELEVEN
I’m flying on happy feet (OK, I might even have done a few skips) up the road to our house feeling like an actual proper person. I’ve been on a date, nothing disastrous has happened and today I’m winning at being a human.
That’s when I notice the flash of a red car in our driveway. Eve’s car. I don’t want to have to deal with her today. I feel all the happiness whoosh out of me like someone just stuck a pin in my side. When it goes, it goes so fast.
Suddenly I’m tired – I used every last scrap of lovely, funny, sparkly, entertaining Grace on Gabe, because I wanted to be the good bits of me, and now I need to flop and not talk to humans and be on my own.
I can feel my feet dragging with dread as I walk up the road. Withnail is sitting on the neighbours’ wall and I stop to stroke him, watching as he arches himself up to my hand, wishing I could just curl up out here and be peaceful.
By the time I get to the driveway, it feels as if someone’s switched off a light inside me, and all the good stuff that’s just happened with Gabe – the ‘I’ll text you later’, the kiss at the end of the road, the silly conversation holding hands as we walked back from the Botanic Gardens – it’s like it never existed.
I turn the key in the lock and shove the door open. I don’t even bother trying to creep in and avoid her – I live here, so why should I? It stinks of a mixture of her perfume and disgusting stale cigarette smoke and it chokes in my throat. I can hear the clock ticking loudly in the hall and as I kick my shoes off and they slide under the dresser it’s as if the sounds are amplified and they echo in my head, which is full to bursting, and I put my hands over my ears for a moment to try to block it out.
I throw my coat at the banister post and it swings sideways and slumps down on to the floor. I leave it there and stomp into the kitchen. Surprise, surprise – they’re sitting at the table and – shock horror – they’ve got a bottle of wine open.
‘Grace, darling, you look nice,’ says Mum. Her smile looks as if she’s baring her teeth, because my vision is going weird.
I don’t answer. I open the fridge and there’s hardly any orange juice. The milk is sitting out on the worktop, which makes me want to be sick. I pick it up, and pointedly put it back in the fridge, making a mental note not to drink any of it.
‘Honey, are you looking for something to eat?’ She’s put on that fake, sing-song voice again, the one she uses when Eve’s here. It’s like she’s playing at being herself and I want to scream at her. She ought to realize I’m on the edge. Normally she can tell, but since Eve appeared it’s as if she stopped looking.
So I ignore her again. There’s no bread in the breadbin, the milk’s probably off, there’s nothing to eat in the fridge and the kitchen – and, yes, I know: I’m a hypocrite – looks like a shit-heap.
I hear Eve saying something quietly to Mum, but I can’t quite make it out. And out of nowhere I feel it beginning. It’s a heat in my head, and my ears are thrumming with red noise. I can feel my chest rising and falling rapidly and it’s weird, because there’s a split second where I could probably just stop this, just walk out and not let the meltdown happen. But then it’s too late and like a wave it hits and my temper rises and I turn round.
‘Have you got something you want to say?’ I look at her.
‘Grace.’ Mum’s tone is warning. ‘You sound like you need some quiet.’
Oh now she gets it. Well, it’s too late.
‘It’s not my place to say anything,’ begins Eve.
‘Well don’t, then.’ I glare at her.
‘But Julia’s my friend and I’m not going to sit here and listen to you giving her attitude. She’s got enough going on without you making life difficult for her—’
‘Eve –’ Mum shakes her head, her eyes sort of half narrowed – ‘leave it. Grace, darling, do you want me to run you a bath? Lavender oil?’
I know what she’s trying to do. I don’t want to calm down. I don’t want to take a deep breath. I don’t want to fake being lovely Grace let’s-remember-our-manners. I’m sick of that cow being in our house, and I’m sick of everything being different and I want her to go and I want –
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ says Eve quietly, reaching across and putting her hand on Mum’s arm. She thinks I can’t hear her.
‘And I don’t know what you’re doing here,’ I shout at her, and I slam the glass down on the table so orange juice sloshes over the sides and leaves a puddle on the wood. ‘Nobody wants you and Mum’s just too polite to say that and you should go because you’re just a—’
‘I’m here because I was invited.’
Why doesn’t she just shut up?
‘Why don’t you just shut up?’
Eve’s eyes widen for a second and she turns to look at Mum, and I know what she’s expecting. But Mum doesn’t say anything, she just sits there looking at me and I realize that I’m double-flapping both my hands in agitation now because I’ve tipped over from slightly pissed off into Hulk smash meltdown mode and my mouth isn’t responsible for what it says because it’s like having tunnel vision.
‘Seriously.’ I look at Eve with hatred. ‘You’re a tragic old lush with no life – that’s why you’re trying to take over Mum’s.’
Eve opens her mouth, but Mum shakes her head.
‘Grace, that’s enough. Eve is my friend, and I won’t have you talking to her like this.’
I can’t do any more of this. I look at Mum in her brand-new just-like-Eve Converse and her suddenly-different jeans and her identical-to-Eve’s stripy top.
‘You’re tragic, you know that? Trying to pretend you’re something you’re not. You’re as bad as her.’
As soon as I say it, I feel the heart-thumpy realization that I’ve gone too far and I’ve hit a sore point, because Mum sort of crumples a bit and it makes me even more furious because she turns to her and I’m left standing there. And I hate her for being so pathetic and needy because I miss Dad too, but you don’t see me turning into a clone. And then Leah appears out of nowhere, just in time to do her perfect-child-I’m-so-virtuous act and the red fury hits me again.
‘And you don’t even care that this whole house has gone to shit since Dad went away.’
‘Because he’s so bloody perfect –’ Eve starts, but Mum shoots her a look and she stops talking.
‘Grace –’
I turn to leave the room, sweeping a load of papers off the table and kicking the door. And because she’s in the way and she’s always so perfect and I hate myself, I shove Leah, hard, so she rebounds backwards against the wall of the kitchen with a surprised noise and I slam the door and crash upstairs with the noise still ringing in my head. I hate them.
As soon as I shut the door of the bedroom and I slump down against it, blocking it shut, I feel the tears starting. I cry and cry until I’ve run out and then I just sit there for ages feeling like I’m in a black hole. Eventually I pick up one of my fidget toys and twiddle with it for a while and it’s calming, but I feel sick with what’s happened. And guilty for the things I said – well, to Mum, anyway; I still hate her – and it’s like I imagine a hangover must feel. Like my face aches with crying and I feel this solid lump of guilt in my chest that stops me breathing properly. I hate this. When I was little, it used to happen all the time. Now I’m older and I know what pushes my buttons I can stop it, sometimes. But other times it’s like there’s a game of Jenga going on in my head and I never know what’s going to make everything fall apart.
Later – and I’ve moved on to the bed, because sitting on the floor was making my legs feel weird – I’m lying down, on top of the covers, trying to work out what to do. I can hear noises downstairs but nobody’s coming to make sure I’m OK – when I was smaller and I felt like this, Mum would try to fix it. But she’s too busy with Eve and I’m too humiliated to go downstairs and be forced to apologize. And, anyway, I do wish Eve would go away and leave us all alone. But I feel like crap for shoving Leah, who didn’t have anything to do with any of it.
As if she’s heard me thinking about her, there’s a knock on the door and I know who it is.
‘I brought you coffee,’ she says. And an arm holding a cup slides through the gap in the door.
‘It’s fine,’ I say through the cushion I’ve pulled up to cover my face because I don’t want to look at her. ‘You can come in.’
She slinks in and puts the cup down on my desk.
‘Sorry.’
I surprise myself by saying it. Most of the time I find it almost impossible to get the word out. Not because I’m not sorry, but because it’s like there’s a glass bubble in my mouth stopping the words from forming.
‘’S all right,’ says Leah, and she does a sort of flat-mouthed upside-down smile, which means it’s OK. ‘Mum said to bring the coffee up. She said you needed time to calm down by yourself.’
And then she leaves.
I feel like I’ve been dipped in acid – raw and flayed and sore. I’m so tired that even though I’m drinking the coffee Leah’s brought me I’ll be asleep in a moment, cocooned under the weight of the blankets I’ll wrap around me.
‘Sweetheart?’
I’m not awake, but I am, almost. I feel the weight of Mum sitting down on the edge of the bed, the pressure of the duvet pulled tighter across my legs. I don’t move. It’s got dark outside while I’ve been sleeping.
‘I thought you might be asleep.’ A hand reaches out and rests on my leg. It’s quite comfortable, actually. I lie there with my eyes closed, because even if she thought I was awake there’s no way I could look at her. When I feel like this, afterwards, I can’t look at people. It hurts my eyes.
‘Eve’s gone back to her hotel. I thought you’d want to know that. And, Gracie, darling . . .’ There’s a pause, and I hear her sighing. ‘I’m sorry you felt the way you did – the way you do. I’m trying, you know. It’s not easy, doing everything with Daddy gone. And all this change –’
She hardly ever calls him Daddy. I imagine his nice smiling face and his beardy chin and the lump of guilt travels up into my throat and becomes a lump of missing and sadness.
I feel her getting up from the bed and switching on my lava lamps. One, two, three, four, until the room is full of purple and pink and blue and red, which I can see through my eyelids – or can I just imagine it? And there’s a rustling as she opens a box and I know just before the scent hits me that she’s dropped lavender on the little bowl on the radiator.
She sits down again.
‘All I’m trying to do is the right thing, darling. Nobody gives us a rule book when we grow up, you know.’
She rubs my leg for a moment then gets up again.
‘Love you, darling.’
As she’s closing the door, I say it. It might have been too quiet for her to hear, but I did say it.
‘Love you.’
And I think,
I’m sorry.
And then I fall asleep again.