Before I Die (15 page)

‘Maybe it’s an autumn thing,’ Zoey says. ‘Or pollution. The whole crazy planet’s dying. You should think yourself lucky you’re getting out of here.’

Zoey says she needs to pee, and she goes down the steps onto the beach and crouches there. I can’t quite believe she’s doing this. There’s hardly anyone about, but usually she’d really care about somebody seeing her. Her pee gushes a hole in the sand and disappears, steaming. She looks very primeval as she hitches herself up and makes her way back to me.

We stand for a bit looking at the sea together. It rushes, whitens, retreats.

‘I’m glad you’re my friend, Zoey,’ I say, and I take her hand in mine and hold it tight.

We walk along to the harbour. I almost tell her about Adam and the motorbike ride and what happened on the hill, but it feels too difficult, and really I don’t want to talk about it. I get lost in remembering this place instead. Everything’s so familiar – the souvenir hut with its buckets and spades and racks of postcards, the whitewashed walls of the ice-cream parlour and the giant pink cone glinting outside. I’m even able to find the alley near the harbour that’s a short cut through to the hotel.

‘It looks different,’ I tell her. ‘It used to be bigger.’

‘But it’s the right place?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Great, so can we go back to the car now?’

I open the gate, walk up the little path. ‘I wonder if they’ll let me look at the room we used to stay in.’

‘Christ!’ mutters Zoey, and she plonks herself on the wall to wait.

A middle-aged woman opens the door. She looks kind and fat and is wearing an apron. I don’t remember her. ‘Yes?’

I tell her that I used to come here as a child, that we had the family room every summer for two weeks.

‘And are you looking for a room for tonight?’ she asks.

Which hadn’t actually crossed my mind, but suddenly sounds like a wonderful idea. ‘Can we have the same one?’

Zoey comes marching up the path behind me, grabs my arm and spins me round. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Booking a room.’

‘I can’t stay here, I’ve got college tomorrow.’

‘You’ve always got college,’ I tell her. ‘And you’ve got lots more tomorrows.’

I think this sounds rather eloquent and it certainly seems to shut Zoey up. She slouches back to the wall and sits there gazing at the sky.

I turn back to the woman. ‘Sorry about that,’ I say. I like her. She isn’t at all suspicious. Perhaps I look fifty today, and she thinks Zoey’s my terrible teenage daughter.

‘There’s a four-poster bed in there now,’ she says, ‘but it’s still en-suite.’

‘Good. We’ll take it.’

We follow her upstairs. Her bottom is huge and sways as she walks. I wonder what it would be like having her for a mother.

‘Here we go,’ she says as she opens the door. ‘We’ve completely re-decorated, so it probably looks different.’

It does. The four-poster bed dominates the room. It’s high and old-fashioned and draped with velvet.

‘We get lots of honeymooners here,’ the woman explains.

‘Fantastic!’ Zoey snarls.

It’s difficult to see the sunny room I used to wake up in every summer. The bunk beds have gone, replaced by a table with a kettle and tea things. The arched window is familiar though, and the same fitted wardrobe lines one wall.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the woman says.

Zoey kicks off her shoes and hauls herself onto the bed. ‘This room is seventy pounds a night!’ she says. ‘Do you actually have any money on you?’

‘I just wanted to look.’

‘Are you insane?’

I climb up beside her on the bed. ‘No, but it’s going to sound stupid out loud.’

She props herself up on one elbow and looks at me suspiciously. ‘Try me.’

So I tell her about the last summer I ever came here, how Mum and Dad were arguing more than ever. I tell her how at breakfast one morning, Mum wouldn’t eat, said she was sick of sausages and tinned tomatoes and that it would’ve been cheaper to go to Benidorm.

‘Go then,’ Dad said. ‘Send us a postcard when you get there.’

Mum took my hand and we came back upstairs to the room. ‘Let’s hide from them,’ she said. ‘Won’t that be fun?’ I was really excited. She’d left Cal with Dad. It was me she’d chosen.

We hid in the wardrobe.

‘No one will find us here,’ she said.

And nobody did, although I wasn’t sure anyone was actually looking. We sat there for ages, until eventually Mum crept out to get a pen from her bag, then came back and wrote her name very carefully on the inside of the wardrobe door. She passed me the pen and I wrote my name next to hers.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Even if we never come back, we’ll always be here.’

Zoey eyes me doubtfully. ‘Is that it? End of story?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You and your mum wrote your names in a cupboard and we had to drive forty miles for you to tell me?’

‘Every few years we disappear, Zoey. All our cells are replaced by others. Not a single bit of me is the same as when I was last in this room. I was someone else when I wrote my name in there, someone healthy.’

Zoey sits up. She looks furious. ‘So, if your signature’s still there you’ll be miraculously cured, will you? And if it isn’t, then what? Didn’t you hear that woman say they’d re-decorated?’

I don’t like her shouting at me. ‘Can you look in the wardrobe and see, Zoey?’

‘No. You made me come here and I didn’t want to. I feel like crap, and now this – a stupid cupboard! You’re unbelievable.’

‘Why are you so angry?’

She scrambles off the bed. ‘I’m leaving. You’re doing my head in looking for signs all the time.’ She gets her coat from where she dumped it by the door and yanks it on. ‘You go on and on about yourself, like you’re the only one in the world with anything wrong. We’re all in the same boat, you know. We’re born, we eat, we shit, we die. That’s it!’

I don’t know how to be when she’s yelling this loud. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Same question,’ she shouts, ‘right back to you!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me, apart from the obvious.’

‘Then I’m fine too.’

‘No, you’re not. Look at you.’

‘Look at me, what? What do I look like?’

‘Sad.’

She falters by the door. ‘Sad?’

There’s a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

When she finally speaks, her voice is heavy and dull. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘I wasn’t going to tell you.’

‘Are you sure?’

She sinks down into the chair next to the door. ‘I did two tests.’

‘Did you do them right?’

‘If the second window turns pink and stays pink, then you’re pregnant. It stayed pink twice.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Would you stop saying that?’

‘Does Scott know?’

She nods. ‘I couldn’t find him that day at the supermarket and he wouldn’t answer his phone all weekend, so I went round to his house yesterday and made him listen. He hates me. You should have seen the look on his face.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like I’m an idiot. Like how can I be so stupid? He’s definitely seeing someone else. Those girls were right.’

I want to walk over and stroke her shoulders, the tough curve of her spine. I don’t though, because I don’t think she’d want me to.

‘What will you do?’

She shrugs, and in that shrug I see her fear. She looks about twelve. She looks like a kid on a boat, travelling on some big sea with no food or compass.

‘You could have it, Zoey.’

‘That’s not even funny.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be. Have it. Why not?’

‘I’m not having it because of you!’

I can tell this isn’t the first time she’s thought this. ‘Get rid of it then.’

She moans softly as she leans her head against the wall behind her and stares hopelessly up at the ceiling.

‘I’m over three months,’ she says. ‘Do you think that’s too late? Do you think they’ll even let me have an abortion?’ She wipes the first tears from her eyes with her sleeve. ‘I’m so stupid! How could I have been so stupid? My mum’s going to find out now. I should’ve gone to a chemist and got the morning-after pill. I wish I’d never met him!’

I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know if she’d even hear me if I could think of anything. She feels very far away sitting on that chair.

‘I just want it gone,’ she says. Then she looks right at me. ‘Do you hate me?’

‘No.’

‘Will you hate me if I get rid of it?’

I might.

‘I’m going to make a cup of tea,’ I tell her.

There are shortbread biscuits on a plate and little sachets of sugar and milk. This really is a very nice room. I look out of the window while I wait for the kettle to boil. Two boys are playing football on the promenade. It’s raining and they’ve got their hoods up. I don’t know how they can see the ball. Zoey and me were down there just now, in the cold and the wind. I held Zoey’s hand.

‘There are daily boat trips from the harbour,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe they go somewhere warm and far away.’

‘I’m going to sleep,’ she says. ‘Wake me up when it’s over.’

But she doesn’t move from the chair and she doesn’t close her eyes.

A family walk past the window. A dad pushing a buggy and a small girl in a pink shiny mac clutching her mum’s hand in the rain. She’s wet, maybe cold, but she knows she’ll be home and dry soon. Warm milk. Children’s TV. Maybe a biscuit and early pyjamas.

I wonder what her name is. Rosie? Amber? She looks like her name would have a colour in it. Scarlett?

I don’t really mean to. I don’t even think about it first. I simply walk across the room and open the wardrobe door. I startle the coat hangers and they chink together. The smell of damp wood fills me.

‘Is it there?’ Zoey asks.

The inside of the door is glossy white. A total re-paint. I touch it with my fingers, but it stays the same. It’s so bright it makes the room waver at the edges. Every few years we disappear.

Zoey sighs and leans back in her chair. ‘You shouldn’t’ve looked.’

I shut the wardrobe door and go back to the kettle.

I count as I pour water onto the tea bags. Zoey’s over three months pregnant. A baby needs nine months to grow. It’ll be born in May, same as me. I like May. You get two bank holiday weekends. You get cherry blossom. Bluebells. Lawnmowers. The drowsy smell of new-cut grass.

It’s one hundred and fifty-four days until May.

Twenty-three

Cal comes trotting up from the bottom of the dark garden, his hand outstretched. ‘Next,’ he says.

Mum opens the box of fireworks on her lap. She looks as if she’s choosing a chocolate, delicately picking one out, then reading the label before passing it over.

‘Enchanted Garden,’ she tells him.

He rushes back to Dad with it. The tops of his wellies slap against each other as he runs. Moonlight filters through the apple tree and splashes the grass.

Mum and me have brought chairs from the kitchen and we’re sitting together by the back door. It’s cold. Our breath like smoke. Now winter is here, the earth smells wet, as if life is hunkering down, things crouching low, preserving energy.

Mum says, ‘Do you know how truly horrible it is when you go off and don’t tell anyone where you are?’

Since she’s the great disappearing expert of all time, I laugh at that. She looks surprised, obviously doesn’t get the irony. ‘Dad says you slept for two days solid when you got back.’

‘I was tired.’

‘He was terrified.’

‘Were you?’

‘We both were.’

‘Enchanted Garden!’ Dad announces.

There’s a sudden crackle, and flowers made of light bloom into the air, expand, then sink and fade across the grass.

‘Ahhh,’ Mum says. ‘That was lovely.’

‘That was boring,’ Cal cries as he comes galloping back to us.

Mum opens the box again. ‘How about a rocket? Would a rocket be any better?’

‘A rocket would be excellent!’ Cal runs round the garden to celebrate before handing it over to Dad. Together they push the stick into the ground. I think of the bird, of Cal’s rabbit. Of all the creatures that have died in our garden, their skeletons jostling together under the earth.

‘Why the seaside?’ Mum asks.

‘I just fancied it.’

‘Why Dad’s car?’

I shrug. ‘Driving was on my list.’

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you can’t go around doing just what you like. You have to think about the people who love you.’

‘Who?’

‘The people who love you.’

‘Loud one,’ Dad says. ‘Hands over ears, ladies.’

The rocket launches with a single
boom
, so loud its energy expands inside me. Sound waves break in my blood. My brain feels tidal.

Mum’s never said she loves me. Not ever. I don’t think she ever will. It would be too obvious now, too full of pity. It would embarrass both of us. Sometimes I wonder at the quiet things that must have passed between us before I was born, when I was curled small and dark inside her. But I don’t wonder very often.

She shifts uncomfortably on her chair. ‘Tessa, are you planning on killing anyone?’ She sounds casual, but I think she might mean it.

‘Of course not!’

‘Good.’ She looks genuinely relieved. ‘So what’s next on your list then?’

I’m surprised. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I really do.’

‘OK. Fame’s next.’

She shakes her head in dismay, but Cal, who has turned up for the next firework, thinks it’s hilarious. ‘See how many drinking straws you can stuff in your mouth,’ he says. ‘The world record’s two hundred and fifty-eight.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I tell him.

‘Or you could get tattooed all over your body like a leopard. Or we could push you up the motorway in your bed.’

Mum regards him thoughtfully. ‘Twenty-one-shot Cascade,’ she says.

We count them. They shoot up with a soft
phut
, burst into clusters of stars, then drift slowly down. I wonder if the grass will be stained sulphur-yellow, vermilion, aquamarine by morning.