The Art of Not Breathing (2 page)

“I’m back,” he says, as if for some reason we couldn’t see this.

3

THE SUPERMARKET IS COLD AND I’VE GOT MY ARMS INSIDE MY
orange raincoat so that the sleeves hang lifelessly by my side. Dillon trails behind me with his hands in his pockets, looking embarrassed to be seen with us. I get an urge to do my zombie impression. Twisting at the waist, making the sleeves swish about, I stagger toward him with my mouth open and eyes rolling around in my head.

Dillon raises his eyebrows and shuffles close enough to whisper. “What are you doing? You look like you should be in a mental hospital,” he says.

“You should see yourself,” I reply, slipping my arms back into the sleeves.

“Have you forgotten why we’re here? You’re going to really piss them off.”

It’s impossible to forget. Especially because it’s my fault we have to go through this.

“Course not. But zombies don’t like miseries. If you don’t cheer up, they’ll get you.” I roll my eyes back again and hang my tongue out. As I lurch into him, a very convincing zombie-like groan escapes from my mouth.

Dillon smiles. A tiny sideways smile, but it is there.

Then my father picks up some Cadbury chocolate fingers and Mum freaks out.

“He hates those, Colin,” she says, loud enough that people turn and stare at us. I look at Dillon. He shakes his head and pretends to read a sign on the shelf behind.

“Well, he won’t have to eat them,” my father mutters.

“That’s not the point!”

When my father puts the fingers in the trolley anyway, Mum whimpers and pulls her hair, her fingers working through her curls like hungry little worms.

“Why are you being so insensitive?” she says, spitting the words out.

My father stands quietly, looking around, shaking his head. I’m not going to help him out; he
is
being insensitive. He steps back as Mum hurls packets of biscuits at his feet. We seem to have taken over the snacks aisle, and there’s a crowd of people at one end watching us. Two of them I recognize from school, so I hide behind a shopping trolley filled with Jaffa Cakes. I think about doing my zombie impression to distract them from my parents’ argument, but I’m stuck to the floor with shame. Dillon is still reading the sign on the shelf, but it’s obvious he’s pretending, because even from here I can see it says
OUT OF STOCK
in big red letters.

Mum picks up some pink wafers.

“Celia,” my father cries, jumping out of the way, “we’re going home.”

He slams the trolley against the shelf and walks off. The shelf wobbles, and packets of gingersnaps tumble into the trolley. When everyone else has run after my father, I unzip my jacket a little way and slide one of the packets inside so it sits neatly under my arm. Then I scoot to the next aisle, where the party bits are, and grab some candles. They’re the flimsy ones that go in cakes, but they’ll do. At least we’ll have something for tomorrow.

The wait is like listening to a ticking bomb. The closer the day gets, the louder the ticking; the louder the ticking, the more my parents shout; the more my parents shout, the more I want to get in a car and run my father over.

I catch up with them as they’re leaving the supermarket. Dillon walks by Dad’s side and brushes Mum away when she goes to him. He always defends my father—
sucking up
is the term I’d use. I don’t know why, because Dad’s so hard on him. He goes on at Dillon all the time about getting good grades and makes him sit in the kitchen and study if he gets a low mark. I get shouted at and banned from going out, but my father never actually makes me do my homework—he knows I’m a lost cause. For that, at least, I’m grateful. I start on the gingersnaps before we’ve even left the car park. No one says anything. Eventually I offer them around.

“Did you pay for those?” my father asks. In the rearview mirror I see his nostrils flare.

I shake my head.

“For Christ’s sake, Elsie. Do you want to end up in a detention center? Because you’re going the right way about it. They’ve got CCTV, you know.”

I do know this, because I’ve been dragged into a back office and shown footage of myself trying to get a packet of noodles into my back pocket. I don’t know why noodles. At the time it seemed like something that might be useful.

“You can go back and pay for them if you’re that worried.”

My father accelerates, and when we get home he grabs the packet from me and chucks it in the dustbin. Mum doesn’t defend me like she usually does. She’s distracted with everything else. With tomorrow.

4

APRIL 11. MONDAY. MY BIRTHDAY. SCHOOL STARTS AGAIN TODAY
after the Easter break, but I’m not going in. Today I am exempt from school. The sky is still a smoky black when I get dressed. I think I’m the first up, but then I hear the sounds of the others—my parents moving around their bedroom, the wardrobe door sliding open and closed, my mother’s hair dryer, my father’s electric razor. The squirt of an aerosol, one long spray followed by two short ones, then a gap and another short one. I hear the groan of the electric shower in the bathroom as it starts up, and then the running water, which lulls every now and then because the pressure is bad. A dry cough from Dillon’s room. There are no voices. I wonder how loud it might be if we could all hear each other’s thoughts. It would be unbearable, I decide.

One hour until we leave. It zooms by, like a time-lapse video—the black outside turns to blue-gray, to violet-gray, to pinky-gray, and finally it’s just gray, like pencil lead. I use a pocket mirror to apply my Ruby Red (it is, after all, a “special day!”), then climb back under my duvet and wait. In the mirror I watch my lips whisper the words “Eddie. Do you miss me? I miss you!”

My father finally knocks on my door and opens it slightly. Half a face appears, and then his whole body slides into my room.

“Are you ready?”

His voice is even, like he’s bored. I nod without looking at him. I can’t bear to see his eyes. Not today. He turns and leaves.

I chew a Wrigley’s Extra because if I brush my teeth, I’ll mess up the lipstick.

Downstairs, I find Dillon pacing up and down in the living room.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he says, hugging his arms around his waif-like body. “Just waiting.”

We pace in opposite directions, meeting in the middle on each length, occasionally brushing shoulders. My father waits in the hallway with his arms hanging slack by his sides. The silence continues, aside from the gurgling fridge, and my rumbling stomach.

Mum is the last to appear. She always wears the same outfit on this day: white jeans and a tight white T-shirt with nothing over the top, as though it were the middle of summer. She moves like a ghost through the hallway to the front door. In one fluid movement she takes the car keys from the hall table, passes them to my father, opens the front door, and drapes her blue raincoat over her shoulders. We all walk in single file to the car, the glass in the front door rattling as we close it behind us. We drive in deafening silence to Chanonry Point. The drive is only five minutes—we could walk, but we never do. I think it’s so we can make a quick getaway.

No one says “Happy birthday, Elsie.” I say it to myself instead and picture a future birthday when I get cards, presents, and a cake made of donuts.

5

THE BLACK ISLE ISN’T REALLY AN ISLAND—IT’S A PENINSULA
that sticks out from Inverness into the North Sea. It’s called the Black Isle because when the rest of Scotland is coated in snow, it remains uncovered, someone once told me. We seem to have our own weather system, which mostly involves bitterly cold winds, rain, and fog. We do have the occasional blizzard, though. Chanonry Point is a spit of land on the east of the Isle that extends even farther out into the choppy water. Sometimes it feels as though we’re on the edge of the world.

We park and tumble out of the car like lemmings going over a cliff. The sky is a hazy white now, and the cold wind pushes the clouds out over the North Sea. As we navigate our way around the lighthouse and along the shingle beach, patches of pale blue sky appear for a few seconds at a time before disappearing again. Mum’s faded blue jacket clashes with my father’s brown woolly sweater as they walk side by side, stepping in unison, having forgiven each other for the biscuit episode. Mum leans into my father as though she couldn’t walk without him.

Dillon and I walk a few paces behind them, Dillon’s arm around my shoulders. I feel him shivering beside me and think about squeezing his hand or wrapping an arm around him, but I don’t. I have to take three steps for every two of Dillon’s and we collide awkwardly against each other, but neither of us does anything about it. His head is turned to the shore, toward the dolphins splashing about in the froth. They leap high into the air and glide back down into the water effortlessly. Watching them makes my heart expand in my chest.

Eddie loved the dolphins. He called them “fins,” and even though I could say the word properly, I used to call them fins too. I don’t mind dolphins, but I prefer otters because they’re not as common. They’re secretive creatures, and I read that even though the males and females have their own territories in the water, those territories sometimes overlap. Dillon and I are like otters. We have our own spaces—I like to think of them as sandy coves—but on the edge of mine and on the edge of his there’s a little patch where we can be together and everything is okay. It’s a place where we don’t fight or pretend not to know each other. I worry that our patch is getting smaller, though, like the tide is coming in, or maybe there are more rocks now taking over the sandy bits. I suppose otters need rocks to hide among.

We head up from the beach, onto the grassy bank. Halfway up the slope, there’s a wooden cross in the ground. My father ties a white ribbon around the wood—yanking the ends to make sure it’s secure. There should be five, one for every year that’s passed, but one must have flown off, because I only count four. My father runs his hand over the cross and brushes sand and dirt from the engraving. I read it, even though I know what it says. My nose is streaming from the bitter wind. It’s weird reading a memorial with my own birthday on it.

EDWARD MAIN

11 April 2000–11 April 2011

Today we are sixteen. Happy birthday, Eddie.

It still doesn’t feel real. To me, he’s not gone. My twin lives inside my head and is part of me. The other day when I wondered whether I should have a second helping of potatoes, he popped up and said, “You can never have too many potatoes. Finish the bowl!” Sometimes, my hands and feet get extremely cold and I know it’s not me feeling cold, it’s Eddie, so I wrap myself up in a blanket to make sure he’s okay. I give him cocoa before bed and toast with Marmite, even though I can’t stand Marmite. I suppose I eat for two.

Last week, after I’d wrapped us up together on the sofa, Mum looked worried and took my temperature.

“You’re burning up,” she said, frowning.

“He’s cold,” I said by mistake.

“What?”

“I’m cold.”

I got away with it because she was distracted by something in the kitchen.

I haven’t told anyone that Eddie is inside me.

I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.

Mum sinks slowly into the grass and hugs her knees to her chest, burying her head between them. I’m not sure if she’s shivering or crying. Dad strokes her back but looks at me, and his eyes are small and droopy. Dillon tries to light a candle, then gives up and pushes it down into the earth. I can barely feel my toes and have to jiggle to warm up. I run the ribbons through my fingers, feeling the smooth side and then the rough side, until my father tells me to stop.

“Please don’t do that, Elsie. Stop fidgeting.”

I stop and take a deep breath and look at the cross. Now for the words I practiced.

“Hey, bro!” I say, loudly. “Let’s play chase. Bet you canny catch me!” I throw my arm out ready to high-five him. But even before I feel Eddie reach out to smack my hand, I know I have made an error. Mum pulls her head out from between her knees and stares at me open-mouthed. My father’s eyebrows move up and down as though they don’t know where on his face they should be. His arm shoots out toward me, but then he snaps it back. He was about to slap me—I’m sure of it.

“What on earth are you doing?” he shouts.

Dillon takes my hand, and I try to remember the words, but my mind is blank.

“I thought he might like to play a game,” I stammer.

My father leans toward me. “Are you not taking this seriously? Are you on drugs or something?”

“I just thought we could be happy today,” I continue, even though I know I should stop now.

I look to Mum for help. Mascara runs down her cheeks, little black snakes edging toward her lips. My father turns to Dillon.

“Has she taken something?”

Dillon shakes his head. I will him to defend me. But he says nothing.