Ghosted, page 2
Weirdo.
‘Bye,’ he says, coming up to the landing and patting my shoulder. ‘Have a good day. I finish at five, so I’ll be home at twenty past. I’ll run you back up to school at sevenish and wave you off.’
‘Shit!’
‘Joseph!’
He goes down the stairs. I follow. Dad hates anything that could be seen as ‘bad language’, however mild. It’s one of the rules. Gus and I aren’t allowed to swear because if we did ‘that would make it feel normal, and then I’d start doing it at work and I’d be fired, and we’d have to get our food out of bins’. It’s a legitimate reason. All the same …
‘Shit is hardly swearing,’ I say, jumping down the last three stairs in one go. ‘But sorry. I forgot about tonight. That’s all.’
Gus laughs at me from the landing.
‘You forgot about your French exchange?’ He points a finger. ‘Not credible! You’ve been obsessing about it for, like, a year. You can’t have forgotten it now because you’re going today.’
I point back. ‘I just woke up! I had a weird dream and I forgot. So shoot me.’
He makes his fingers into a gun and fires it at me. I clutch my chest and pretend to die, but it feels all wrong. My dream echoes round the house. I fall to the floor and expire dramatically, more to distract myself than anything else.
‘You two!’ Dad is putting his shoes on and checking he has his lanyard. ‘You’re worse than the toddlers. Yet I seem to be trusting you to get yourselves to school. Bye, babies!’
Gus and I look at each other after the door clicks shut.
‘Where’s Mum?’ I didn’t plan to say that, but those seem to be the words that come out. Where’s Mum? Jesus. I walk into the living room. Gus follows.
‘Mum?’ He laughs. ‘Hello? Gone to learn how to be a yoga teacher? As you know perfectly well. Do you need your mummy?’
My mind is foggy. I knew that. I just haven’t woken up properly.
‘Fine. Well, you’ve got to help me not go on the French exchange.’
I pace round the room. I don’t know why I feel like this. I pick up the little clown that Dad won, sixteen years ago, at some circus awards. I look at its creepy face, then put it down facing away from me. It can stare out of the window instead. Our house is full of weird shit like that.
‘How?’ says Gus. ‘Hide you under my bed? Stay there a week and I’ll pass you a Twix when I remember.’
‘I’d take that,’ I say. ‘Right now I’d do it. A week under your bed with your stinky socks and whatever else. And a Twix.’
He smiles, and I force a smile back. I don’t know why I’m feeling like this. I am not the sort of person who freaks out. I’m going away for less than a week and yet I seem to have lost the plot. I’m going to have to fake it to get through the day. Do an impression of myself.
‘It’ll be OK,’ Gus says. ‘The moment you leave, you’ll be on a countdown to coming back. Once you get going, it’ll go quickly. Also he might be cool. Your “pen pal”.’ He makes quote marks in the air to demonstrate how incredibly uncool this concept actually is. ‘Enzo. You know he’s probably dreading it as much as you are?’
‘Yeah. He’ll hate me coming to stay. Thanks, bro.’
Gus softens. ‘He does sound nice in his letters, to be fair.’
‘He likes going to the cinema and riding his bike. Same as me.’
‘J’aime faire des promenades à velo avec mon frère?’
‘Sans mon frère,’ I say. Without my brother.
I head for the shower. Gus doesn’t fight me for it because he’s at sixth form and he seems to go to college whenever he fancies it. Gus never had to go on a stupid French exchange because he managed not to take a language for GCSE because he’s dyslexic. Some people are so lucky.
I have Troy’s house-football trophy in my schoolbag and when I remember it makes me hot with shame. What’s wrong with me? It’s a little metal football with a boot kicking it. He won it yesterday: I thought it was going to be me, and so did everybody else. I took it from his bag when he wasn’t looking because I was jealous. What a knob.
I shake my head, shove the trophy to the bottom of the bag and dash out of the house. I’ll give it back to him later and say sorry. I’m a shit friend.
Troy is late. Maybe he’s not meeting me because of the trophy, because he realized it was missing and knew it was me. I stand on the corner and wait. The woman from the next street lets her dog do a poo in the middle of the pavement. She doesn’t pick it up and pretends not to hear me saying, ‘Gross!’ as she speed-walks away, her head down.
Mr Armstrong, the sad man who lives next door, ambles past and says, ‘Ah, hello, Joseph. Just getting my paper.’
I have to make an effort with him. Dad says that since his wife died it might be the only interaction he has all day.
‘Hello, Mr Armstrong,’ I say.
‘Everything all right at your house?’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m going away later. French exchange trip.’
‘Are you? Oh gosh,’ he says. ‘I used to love France. Bernadette and I went every year. Are you taking the ferry?’
‘We are, yeah. We’re going on the coach, and then the night ferry to Roscoff, and then the coach all the way down France.’ I shiver. ‘I don’t want to go,’ I add. Might as well give Mr A the facts. I feel tears pricking at the back of my eyes. What the hell?
‘You’ll have a marvellous time!’ he counters. ‘Do you have any francs? I have a few coins somewhere. I could give them to you.’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Armstrong,’ I say, smiling at the thought of his old holiday money. ‘Cheers for the offer, though!’
I smile and wave goodbye as Troy turns up after all. It’s easy to see him coming because he’s much taller than everyone else and has bright red hair. I always grin at the sight of him. He said once that he knows he looks like an illustration of a cheeky boy from a children’s book, and he does a bit, but that doesn’t keep model-agency people from stopping him in the street. He’s a quarter Dutch, and reckons that’s why he’s so tall.
‘Wazzup?’ he says. ‘And what are you doing chatting to that old perv?’ I’m so glad Troy isn’t pissed off that I laugh a bit too hysterically.
‘He is not a perv!’ I manage to say. ‘He’s a nice old man. He was married for years. I bet he’d only perv at girls.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He wanted to give me his French money.’
‘Old man offers teenager money on a street corner?’
I know I should give him back that trophy right now. I want to do it, but maybe he hasn’t even noticed it’s gone, and then he starts talking French, so I go with that instead. Troy is brilliant at French. He’ll be fine with his host family. He can’t wait to go.
It takes about fifteen minutes to get to school. Troy makes me laugh all the way. We talk about France, and wonder whether we’ll have to eat frogs’ legs. I feel myself coming back.
‘Remember when we caught that frog on the playing field?’ he asks. ‘At primary school?’
‘We tried to use it to scare the girls,’ I say, remembering. ‘But they thought it was cute.’
‘They made it a hat out of a leaf and called it Froggykins.’
We gather more hangers-on as we walk, like people in a musical, but without the part where we burst into song and dance. By the time we get to school our crowd has dissolved into the tide of teens going into the building.
Lucas comes over to me, as usual. He was new last year, and he tries so hard to be my friend that I can’t help taking the piss. I’m tall, and Troy’s taller, but Lucas is massive. There was a story a while ago about a thirty-year-old who went back to school, pretending to be sixteen, and got away with it for ages: that feels like Lucas to me. Troy and I are kind of skinny, but Lucas is built like a shed. He doesn’t look like a teenager. He makes me feel uncomfortable.
‘All right?’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
‘Shame you’re not coming on the French trip,’ I say, laughing as I speak because he knows as well as I do that I don’t think that.
‘Yeah,’ he says again. ‘Too expensive. Dommage.’
I roll my eyes and walk off. Then I turn back and say, ‘Thank fuck,’ in a way that’s just quiet enough for him to wonder whether he heard properly, and then I burrow into the crowd. Lucas isn’t in any of my Thursday classes, so I probably won’t see him again today, and that means I’ll be spared his company until I come back from France.
3
We would have been able to keep Dad’s departure secret for much longer if he hadn’t written that email. As it was we didn’t even make it through the first day. During my last lesson (physics) two students came in. One of them handed a piece of paper to Mr Dean and the other sat down and joined the lesson. I was trying really hard to concentrate on atomic structure. I was proving (to myself, to Sasha, to the world) that I would manage in a household of two teenagers and a foetus. I had to show them that I wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t be better off in care. Right now that meant mastering isotopes.
Someone left the room. I looked up to see a boy from Year Nine going out of the door. The other one, a girl I didn’t know, was just sitting there reading a book. It was strange that Mr Dean hadn’t spoken to her or introduced her as new to the class.
I turned back to the isotopes but it was hard to concentrate. My mind wandered. We had no parents left at home. Sasha was my anchor and I had to be hers. We both had the baby, but that felt like a lot of pressure to put on someone who was only half gestated; who was, we’d only just discovered, a tiny little boy.
I thought I could tether myself with mass numbers, but I kept thinking of Mum, and of how excited she would have been about her grandson, and how furious with Dad. I was wondering whether I could will her back to life with the power of my longing, because I needed her so much, when Mr Dean said, ‘Ariel? Could you pop along to the office?’ He checked the clock. ‘You may as well take your things.’
He put the piece of paper down on his table and gave me a sympathetic look. Everyone knew that Ariel has been through a hard time this year.
I glanced at Izzy and she patted my leg. I stopped caring about electrons. I needed to speak to Sasha right now to check whether school had called her. We had to get our stories straight.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and Mr Dean started walking around talking about atoms while everyone except the new girl (who just carried on reading) watched me gathering my things together. There were fifteen minutes until the end of the lesson and I could sense a lot of people with no real problems wishing they were the ones leaving early. I wanted them to stop looking. My hands were shaking as I picked everything up. I almost kicked my chair over, but Izzy caught it and put it upright.
Mr Dean walked over to Aisha, and sat down next to her to look at something in her book. He had sat down where the new girl was and she suddenly wasn’t there any more. I didn’t know where she’d gone. Aisha turned to stare at me, ignoring Mr Dean and her book, and I wanted to ask what had happened to the girl who’d been beside her, but I didn’t.
What was going on? I refused to lose my mind as well as everything else.
I looked at the boys instead, silently begging one of them to do something stupid and take the attention away from me. I focused on Jack, with his messy dark hair and sharp cheekbones. Go on, I thought. Do something. Do it for me. Drop your book. Throw something. Fight with someone. I wasn’t being sexist: it was almost always boys that arsed around in lessons and, although Jack and I broke up when Mum got ill, we’d never stopped being friends. He would have done it if he’d realized I needed it.
As it was, though, no one did anything. I made it to the door. Jack said, ‘Bye, Ariel!’ as I left, and when I looked round the whole class was waving stupidly at me, and Izzy was mouthing, ‘Good luck.’
I’d always had friends, but everyone except Izzy had melted into the background since Mum got ill. I knew I’d changed, and everyone else had carried on without me, but Izzy had been there, at the end of a phone, or right next to me, throughout. She had her own stuff going on, but she’d always drop it when I needed her.
I’d needed her a lot.
I texted her as I walked slowly through the silent school: You’re literally the best person in the world.
Then I called Sasha and slowed my pace still further.
‘Mermaid!’ said Sasha. She and Mum were the only people who were allowed to call me that. I hated it if anyone else tried. The baby could do it, though, if he wanted to. ‘Thank God. So I had a call from school wanting to talk to Dad, and I told them he was at work. Have they spoken to you?’
‘On my way. They just pulled me out of physics to go to the office.’ I quickly hung up and shoved my phone away.
‘Ariel,’ said the woman I’d spoken to that morning at reception, and she walked me straight to the head’s office and deposited me inside.
Mr Morrow was in his forties, and one of those teachers who thinks he’s cool and everyone’s best mate. He said, ‘Ariel! Great to see you. Grab a pew. So, what’s going on at home?’
He leaned forward and started the meaningful eye contact. I looked away first. No way could I stare him out right now.
‘Well, my mum died,’ I said, just to make him uncomfortable.
He nodded in that I’m listening way. ‘And what’s happened in the past few days?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I know my dad sent a weird message, but he didn’t mean anything by it. He’s been upset lately. It’s like, you’d be sad if your wife died, right?’
Mr Morrow didn’t flinch. ‘I would,’ he said.
‘And my sister, Sasha. She’s nearly twenty. So, even if Dad finds things hard, I still have her. She’s an adult.’
‘I can’t argue with that either,’ said Mr Morrow. ‘However, in light of the email your father sent, and in spite of both your and your sister’s insistence that everything’s fine, we decided to call him at work just to check in. And so we were surprised to learn that he’s left his job and taken up a new one in Inverness. Which would explain why he wrote that he was taking you out of school and moving away to start afresh. Ariel, you and Sasha need to begin telling us the truth. Has your father relocated to Scotland without you?’
Busted on day one.
‘I guess,’ I told the top of his desk.
Shit, shit, shit. I waited for a social worker to walk in and take me away. I held on to the edges of my seat. I wouldn’t go. They couldn’t make me. I’d stay here.
Nothing happened. I could feel Mr Morrow looking at me, but I carried on staring at his desk. It was very neat. There was nothing interesting on it: all the paperwork was piled to the side with a local newsletter on top of it and a paperweight. I couldn’t read anything, which I was sure was the plan. He had a poster of someone rock climbing, but at least it didn’t have an inspirational quote underneath.
Still nothing happened.
‘You guess that your father has moved to Scotland?’ he said, and finally I looked up.
‘I didn’t know it was Scotland,’ I said, and I could hear how tight and scared my voice was. ‘He asked me to go with him. He wanted me and him to go, but not Sasha. He hasn’t been happy with her since she told him she was pregnant, and recently he’s gone absolutely mental about it. He’s been awful to her. I said I didn’t want to go, so he just drove off and stuck his keys back through the letterbox. And that’s the truth.’
‘Now this time,’ said Mr Morrow, ‘I believe you.’
‘So I’m going to be absolutely fine living with Sasha,’ I finished, too loudly, adding stupidly, ‘I was concentrating really hard in physics just now. We were doing atomic structure.’
Inverness?
I couldn’t believe Dad had gone that far. Inverness was (I was quite hazy about this) maybe six hundred miles away? If he started driving at about six this morning, which he had, then he probably hadn’t even got there yet. He might have crashed on the way. I was sure he hadn’t slept last night, and his driving was shit and aggressive at the best of times.
He must have been planning this for ages if he had a job all sorted. He’d known about Sasha’s baby for a couple of months. Had he started job-hunting the moment she told him? What the hell kind of parenting was that?
People were supposed to be pleased at becoming grandparents. Or shocked, but then come round to the idea. They weren’t supposed to run away in the night and move to Scotland. I wondered what it was like in Inverness. What would my new school have been like, if I’d gone? Was there a school register somewhere up there with my name on it? Was a teacher I didn’t know going to say, ‘Ariel Brown?’ tomorrow morning and wonder why no one was answering?
And then I started to imagine what life would be like without Dad. If he had really gone – if he wasn’t going to come back – then it might be …
Lovely.
I tuned back in sharply at the words ‘social services’.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t need social services. We don’t need anything like that. We’re fine as we are.’
‘You know, Ariel,’ said Mr M, ‘I actually believe that you’re probably right. That staying where you are, with Sasha, will be much the least disruptive path. That’s my point really. We do have to contact social services, so they can check that both Sasha and you are all right. It’s a positive thing. Not a scary one. Is Sasha’s partner involved?’
‘Jai?’ I said. ‘Kind of. It’s complicated because they were never really in a relationship. They were friends.’ I bit back the words with benefits. ‘But he’s going to be around for Sash and the baby. He’s cool.’
‘Good,’ said Mr Morrow. ‘Well, Ariel, I’d just like to say that we’re all impressed with the way you’ve coped over the past couple of years. You’ve been through more than many of us adults have, and here you are, still standing. I know Ms Duke has been helping out. I’ve brought her up to speed today, and she’s going to have a chat with you tomorrow and on a much more regular basis after that, if you’re OK with the idea. Thank you for confiding in me.’
