The Best Thing Read online

  Dad led me down to the water. His hand wrapped mine halfway to the elbow; I was the height of the bottom edge of his bathers. The waves ran at me, eye-high, hurried, their tops juggling froth. At the last moment he swung me up so that the ocean only dashed the sand from my feet, leaving them fizzing cold.

  Our beach weekend recedes, just one small bracket of a long-running nightmare. It gets colder, and wetter, and darker—and quieter in our house. It’s as if we’re all going into hibernation, just gradually shutting down. Our mouths don’t talk much, so we don’t have to use our ears much (though Mum sometimes puts music on, ‘to cheer us up’—huh!). And of course we can’t meet each other’s eyes any more so soon our sight will go. Then we’ll just all lie down on our beds and fade away for six months, and when the spring comes we’ll wake up being new people, with different lives, and all the crappy stuff from these lives forgotten, swept away with six months’ worth of dreams, just another uncomfortable dream.

  I’m getting so used to living in unbearable tension, if it all went away I think my teeth’d fly out of their sockets from not being clenched. ‘It’s a difficult year,’ say the teachers—if they just knew how difficult!

  Donna and Lisa come in the school gate behind me. I hear their scheming silence even before I look.

  ‘We’re gunna strip you, Dow,’ says Donna.

  I’m sick of this. I turn around and stop. ‘Yeah? What for?’

  They glance at each other. ‘What do you reckon?’ Donna says contemptuously.

  ‘Yeah, Mel. Jesus!’ adds Lisa.

  ‘Beats me.’

  ‘Hey, that’s a good idea. Strip her and then bash her up. Leave her in a gutter somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah. Where she belongs.’ Lisa slides past me after Donna and they go off laughing.

  I drift up from sleep one stolen Thursday afternoon to find Pug looking into my face. ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Is anythink wrong, Mel?’

  Long pause. ‘Every-bloody-thing’s wrong.’ Just saying that much, the rush of relief is huge!

  ‘Shit, what’d I do?’ Talk about look terrified! I have to laugh.

  ‘Not you, you idiot!’

  He puts his hand on his heart to calm it down. ‘Who is it, then? Who’s giving you the shits?’

  ‘My parents. My dad, specifically. Everyone at school, except maybe one teacher—’

  ‘Hang on. What’s your dad goin’ on about, first?’

  I tell him about finding Dad and Ricky together. I watch him all through it, to get his exact reaction.

  A couple of times he winces as if he’s about to stop me speaking. He punctuates my story with little moans of distress.

  ‘Jesus, I thought my family had problems!’ he says when I finish. He swears a few more times, absorbing it. ‘What’ll your mum do when she finds out?’

  ‘If she finds out.’

  ‘Y’gunna tell ’er?’

  ‘Sometime. I’m not sure when.’

  ‘I reckon you should. She should know, don’t you think? I mean, you can’t let someone go on not knowing … somethin’ like that, eh.’

  ‘Eh.’ I look into his clean green worried eyes. ‘Yeah, you’re right, I guess. Any day now I will. Any old day.’ He still looks worried. ‘I will, I will.’

  ‘That’s bad news, mate.’ Mate. I love that. He means it in a companionable kind of way, but also it’s my mate, the way birds choose a mate.

  ‘You’re telling me.’ Having him know, having anyone else know (well, I guess Josh and Ambra know and that’s no comfort)—having Pug know and be on my side, and hearing his concern, which is my concern but minus my anger, clears my mind. It’s not just pure outrage in there any more, revolving on itself, dizzying me into inaction; I can see through that to the massive changes that hang on my telling Mum. It’s still up to me to make the move, to tip the truth into Mum’s brain and watch her world, and Dad’s, and mine, go to pieces, or at least shudder on its axis for a while. Pug has just shown me, with his ducking and wincing, what a cup of poison I’m holding; he’s never even met these people and he can feel the pain.

  ‘What about school? What’s happenin’ there?’

  ‘The usual hassles.’ Slut. Thinks she’s too good to talk to anyone any more. Stackin’ on the weight, aren’t you? All that crap. ‘There’s no-one there I get on with.’

  ‘That bloke you told me about, is he still giving y’a hard time?’

  ‘Oh yeah, that too.’ A pathetic little laugh comes out of me. ‘Feel like I’m down the bottom of a black hole with slippery sides, and just can’t get out. Nothing’s any good at the moment.’

  He sits up and pulls me over so I’m lying in his arms like a baby. ‘We’re okay, aren’t we? I’m not gettin’ up your nose, am I?’

  ‘I don’t think you could get up my nose if you tried.’

  ‘I wouldn’t wanna try.’ He pulls the blankets closer round me, rocks me, pushes back my hair. His face is very light and happy—any minute I expect him to start humming a tune.

  ‘You’re really nice, you know?’ I say. ‘If I didn’t have you to come round and see, I’d’ve shot myself by now.’

  ‘Nah, you wouldn’t cop out like that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I?’ I’m surprised—he sounds so sure.

  ‘Nah, you’re too smart. You wouldn’t let a bunch of dickhead schoolkids get to you that bad.’

  ‘No? Seems to me I’ve been doing just that for six months or so already.’

  ‘You’re workin’ on other stuff, but. In your head. I hear you, the way you talk. The minute you get out of the place … and it’s only six or seven months now, hey? Hang on—May, June—’He counts on his fingers. ‘Yeah, six months, and there’s holidays in there too, remember. Six months, and then you can kiss ’em all off.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘I dunno. Whatever you make up your mind to. You’re like a firecracker someone’s lit. It’s goin’ along that stringy bit—’

  ‘The fuse.’

  ‘Yeah, and right now you’re just spittin’ and sparkin’ and shit, but when you get to the end, when you hit the powder …’

  ‘Everybody stand back, hey?’

  ‘Everyone stand back, because you’re gunna blow right over our heads! You’re gunna be way up there!’

  ‘You’re going to be there to see it, are you?’

  Oh Pug, the look on your face! I could kick myself! Sort of I-guess-not, sort of I-hope-so—and you hesitate, when before you were in full flight.

  ‘If I’m lucky,’ you say very quietly.

  ‘Well, so far you’ve been pretty lucky.’ I try to make up for putting my great fat foot in it.

  ‘Yeah, so far.’

  You don’t sound all that convinced, so I reach up and pull your head down, and you lift mine up in the crook of your elbow, and we kiss in the middle. After that we’re all right.

  Surrounded by the placenta, the twelve-week-old foetus inhales salty amniotic fluid, but draws its oxygen from the blood supplied by the umbilical cord. It now contains its full complement of operational body systems. Nerves, muscles and the developing permanent skeleton are readying the arms and legs for their first movements. True bone is forming rapidly, displacing the cartilage of the embryonic skeleton, which acts as a mould for the stiff calcium layers. In the long arm and leg bones, the calcium is first laid down in the middle of the bones, progressing outwards in both directions. The body wall, beginning at the spine, has grown forward and is now joined at the front.

  I walk home through the falling evening. A period must come soon. It weighs low in me, solid like a lodged apple. The blood is well and truly gathered and ready. Tonight. The ache is big enough, and I feel faintly feverish, and all those tears … all the signs point to it.

  Mum’s cooking up some Italian thing when I get home, all garlic and tomatoes. Just the sight of the olive-oil bottle makes me back out the kitchen door, without having spoken to her. Up in my room I listen to the hormones chug and feel myself t
urning into a pre-menstrual monster. Pug looks crazy, cradling me and telling me fireworks stories. Why is he stupidly not seeing this black me, wimping out on life at every turn, letting herself be victimised, fucked over, dragged around by anyone who offers her the first scrap of approval? So I’ve fooled him—these others aren’t fooled, these parents who’re so tired and impatient with me all the time, these schoolkids who’ve seen how easy I am. They all know the worst.

  Night comes, and I don’t turn the light on. Mum comes up when tea’s ready. ‘Oh dear,’ she says when she sees me curled on the bed. ‘That time again, is it?’

  She leaves me in the dark, in the dread, in a place where nobody can make me feel any better. Bodies do this to you. It’s just a matter of electricity in your brain: suddenly all the switches are down and the black chemicals flood in among your thoughts, staining them all, blotting out the bright ones.

  In the middle of the night I wake up boiling in my clothes, shed some layers, crawl under the covers, drag sleep back over me.

  In the morning I wake clean and dry, not bleeding. ‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I say out loud, for courage.

  Home pregnancy tests come in packets of two. They are reliable, the girl at the chemist said; if they are faulty they’ll tell you you’re not pregnant when you are, not the other way around. In four minutes I am standing in the bathroom with the test in my hand, the thin blue line in the tester window as clear as it can be. There’s no denying it, no possibility of a mistake.

  There was a bleed with the miscarriage. There was another, when, January? Sometime. There may’ve been two. It must be three, four months. It must be—

  I dig my fingers into my belly. Yesterday’s apple, still there. Quite firm. Not about to be bled away.

  In the mirror my face is the same old face I’ve dragged through every crisis. I am one of those pale people, English-pale, always sunscreened to within an inch of my life. My hair is a mess of black squiggles escaping from their band. There are pillowcase-crease marks up one cheek like a very old person’s wrinkles.

  The house is so quiet. Mum and Dad’s alarm hasn’t gone off yet. Thank God. I hurry out, dress. I write a note to Mum, two hard truths, numbered (a) and (b). I push it, in an envelope marked, ‘Mum’, under their bedroom door. I run. I am a coward. I flee. I slam out the door. I hurry up our street, which is foreign, autumn fresh. Mr Close, walking Nelson the bull-terrier, greets me kindly; I bare my teeth at him in an approximation of a smile. I’m past, I’m gone—except that your self always follows you. I’m hurrying, breaking into a run, wanting to be lost in traffic, the world to swallow me up.

  Crossing the park I realise I’m going blind. A patch of blindness has started at the centre of my right eye and is growing. I know what this is: a migraine. Mum’s told me about them. The blindness spreads; I have to peer around it to see the right-hand side of the path. I stand on the kerb at King Street, my head darting like a chook’s so that I can see what I need to see with my left eye. I check twice that the light is green before I cross. Two small catherine wheels are whirling at the left-hand fringe of my vision. As I turn into Pug’s street they are raining fire into my left cheek. My other eye is blank, dead. By the time Pug opens the door I can only recognise him by his voice. There is a short nightmare of huge stairs and runaway limbs. Then there is a bed—it could be on a wall or the ceiling for all I can tell—and Pug sounding soothing somewhere and his hand keeping me from toppling into a swamp of nausea. I can’t speak or see out of my body.

  We wait it out. Things steady slightly; the nausea fades. Sight begins where it first disappeared, a pinpoint in my right eye, gradually clearing.

  ‘This is a migraine,’ I’m finally able to say. ‘My mum gets them. They hit your eyes first, and then they wallop you on the head.’ How did I get here?

  Pug’s head is radiant, four-dimensional with beauty, a great leaning statue-with-feeling, a memorial for every young soldier ever slaughtered. ‘You be okay while I go get some Panadol?’

  ‘I’m fine now.’

  He lets go, and I lounge about two centimetres above the bed like a slightly drunken flying carpet. Immense well-being furs my body from hair-ends to toe-tips. Perhaps this will get rid of the baby.

  Then I hear the distant hunting-horns of the headache, almost pleasant, negligible. Pug comes back with a glass of fizzing medicine-water. I sit up and drink it under the first hoofbeats.

  ‘I told Mum, about Dad. I left a note. I had to get away from there,’ I explain. Any minute now I’ll go on and explain the rest.

  ‘A note? Christ.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s hard. Terrible way to find out. Hard to write, too.’

  ‘I just put the bald truth.’ Truths, Mel. Two of them, remember?

  ‘Jesus, your poor mum.’

  ‘I couldn’t go on covering up for him—’ But I’m beginning to wish I were blind again. The light gallops in, over the hedges and ridges of my brain. This will definitely do the baby in; if it feels half this pain it will not want to be borne, to be born. I curl up like a foetus myself, or like a slater, or a snail’s eye retreating into its stalk. Where did that drug go, sopped up into the blood-thunder? I need more. Knock me out. I curl up smaller.

  I lose track of time. If you lie still with your hands over your eyes, sooner or later you’ll fall asleep, and when I finally achieve sleep it’s the coma type, a complete disappearance.

  When I wake up I’m flat on my back like a corpse, the headache pooled in the back of my skull like a teaspoonful of ink. Eventually I open my eyes. Pug’s gone. Afternoon, quite late. He must be at training. I don’t miss him. I don’t miss anyone. I’m grateful for this empty room. This morning’s events filter through to me, seriously horrifying.

  Maybe Dad picked up the letter, realised what it must be, hid it from Mum. Maybe everything is still as it was. No, Mum always gets up first. Dad’s nearest the door, though. Surely he’d sense me behind it, hear that rub of paper on the carpet, leap awake to rescue himself? Or would he lie there, like me now, while Mum tied her dressing-gown and bent—‘What’s this?’—and laid hold of the envelope, while she tore it open, and stood and read? What would be worse, waking up with Mum screaming blue murder, knowing the game was up, or watching while everything fell apart? But maybe it didn’t. No, I’m sure it did.

  What I’ve done. Disaster all around. Like, people’s lives ruined. Pug’s face wincing: ‘Your poor mum.’ My poor mum. My poor, pathetic father. Poor, pathetic Ricky. Why the hell did they do that? Did they care about us others so little? That’s what’s sickening, their ignoring us and going off together, leaving five individuals without a parent or partner, but without even knowing we’d lost them, still assuming they were there for us. We’re like cartoon characters strolling off a cliff into mid-air. How long were we suspended there (years?) before I walked in on Dad and Ricky and started falling? Now one by one we’ll all realise, and drop—and who knows what’ll happen when five people hit bottom? Oh God. Everything will change. Already everything is different. Between yesterday and today, so much knowing: the blue line across the tester window, the shush of an envelope under a door. Disaster upon disaster, happening so quietly.

  Disaster inside me. Leading Pug on to it, really; lying, or moving into a lie; being on the Pill and then forgetting, and not saying, and finally forgetting so often that I’d stopped being on it, and not saying.

  I sit up and push back the blanket, listening to the headache, which diffuses forward through my brain, but isn’t very strong. My shoes and socks are right there next to the bed; bending to put them on I ignore the apple inside me, ignore it for a bit longer.

  Then the gate clashes and I jump up. It’s just a Jehovah’s Witness, someone selling vacuum cleaners. The front door slams. I pick up my jumper and bag.

  Pug fills the doorway, in his old black tracksuit with the hood. I’m standing in the middle of the room, red-handed.

  ‘What’s up?’

&
nbsp; ‘I have to go.’ I head for the thread of space between him and the doorpost.

  ‘You feeling okay?’ He closes off the space.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Although nausea throbs in my throat.

  ‘You goin’ home?’

  ‘Yeah.’ It sounds like a lie.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No! I mean, I’ll be fine. I’ve got some thinking to do. You’d be—I’ve got to work out what to say to Mum, and everything.’ Babble, babble.

  He must know exactly what I’m up to. He grabs me with a thump. ‘Mel?’

  ‘What?’ That little space has opened up again, but my arms are pinned to my body.

  ‘You tell me what. When are you comin’ back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have to see what happens at home.’

  He tries to see my face. ‘You were gunna just go, weren’t you? Without say in’. Without leavin’ a note. Were you gunna come back?’ He shakes me. ‘Like, ever?’ He takes this outlandish thought out of my head and flaps it in front of my eyes.

  I look up in shock. ‘What?’ I try for a scowl of disbelief that doesn’t quite come off.

  ‘The way you’re acting. Like, you’re running away. What’s up? I don’t mean with your dad and that. I mean with you and me.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with you and me.’ I say it as firmly as possible and look straight into his eyes. Except that I can’t fool myself any longer. I am absolutely on my own. Absolutely, and so are you.