Zelah Green (11 page)

Lib is gesturing for me to shut up.

‘Zelah,’ she says, ‘if you know where Sol has gone you have to tell the Doc. Right now. She’s out of her head with worry.’

I follow her out of the room with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

‘For God’s sake you can do that later,’ says Lib as I stop to do my jumps on the top step.

With a superhuman effort I stop jumping and go down to the kitchen. I make a mental note that I need to do ninety-eight more jumps later to make up the complete set.

The Doc is watering her indoor plants and gazing out into the back garden, frowning. The policeman is back and sitting at the table with Josh and Sol’s dad. There’s a photograph of Sol on the table. I catch sight of the dark eyes and olive skin and feel a great whooshing sinking sensation in my stomach.

‘Zelah’s got something to tell you,’ says Lib, launching straight in.

She flaps her hands at me.

Gino’s filmy, tired eyes stare up at me. Josh turns his sleepy gaze upon me. The Doc swivels
round from the kitchen sink with a red plastic watering can in her hand.

‘Go on, tell them,’ hisses Lib.

The policeman licks his finger and ruffles through his notepad to find a clean page.

‘Sol left me a note,’ I say, in a small voice. Then I put my hands up over my face to shield the barrage of questions about to come my way.

Lots of things happen very fast. Sol’s father grabs the note from my hand. He brushes my fingers with his own and I feel sick with panic but the Doc is blocking my passage to the sink.

The policeman scans the note over Gino’s shoulder and then starts to fire off orders into his walkie-talkie as he heads off towards his car.

Gino shakes hands with the Doc and Josh, grabs his jacket and follows the policeman.

I stand by the kitchen table with tears pouring down my face and plopping on to my silver flip-flops.

The Doc gestures for me to sit down.

‘You should have told us straight away,’ she says. Her face is cold and stern behind the glasses. ‘I thought you had more sense than that, Zelah.’

‘I do,’ I say, snorting up snot and feeling around my jeans for a tissue before it drips on my clothes and contaminates them.

‘Here you are, honey,’ says Josh, chucking me a packet. The gesture makes me cry even more.

‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ he says to the Doc. ‘Sol did make her promise not to tell. You know what the kids are like with loyalty.’

The Doc nods in silence and fiddles with her charm bracelet. When she looks at me again, her eyes are kinder.

‘Well, at least you told us in the end,’ she says. ‘I’m sure the police will find Sol now.’

I find Lib waiting for me outside my bedroom.

‘You did the right thing,’ she says. She’s already making off downstairs towards her own room. Lib is spending more and more time closeted away from the rest of us. I haven’t heard the Arctic Monkeys blaring out for ages.

I think of Sol’s dark haunted eyes and sad note. I shiver. He’s going to kill me if the police bring him back here.

‘I hope so, Lib,’ I say to her retreating back. ‘I really hope so.’

That evening something weird happens.

I never finish off my jumps.

I pass the top stair and hesitate for a moment.

Then I just keep on walking, up to my bedroom.

I feel a bit sick and floaty and as if some large heavy thing is missing from my evening, but I just scrub my face and hands instead.

I’m still doing this at half-ten when I hear the
heavy click of the front door downstairs.

The Doc is talking to somebody in the hall. Her voice rises in anger and then dips down into a consoling murmur. There’s another click and out of the window I see the policeman take off his hat and walk back down the front path in a slow, relaxed sort of way.

I know in a flash.

Sol’s been found.

I hear Alice run downstairs and Lib’s slower footsteps following. Caro stays in her room. She turns up the music a fraction louder.

I stay rooted on my bed, eyes upon the door. Any minute now it’s going to open and Sol’s going to burst in and attack me with his eyes flashing and his arms flailing about.

I wait.

The clock ticks past eleven.

I wait a bit more.

I decide to lie down on the duvet. Might as well be comfortable before I meet my death.

The next thing I know I’m pulled out of sleep by a nameless invisible presence.

I reach for my lamp.

Sol is glaring at me from the foot of my bed.

H
e looks dreadful.

His bomber jacket is splattered with mud and there’s a large hole in the knee of his jeans. His face is haggard and there’s dark stubble on his top lip and chin.

‘Oh, you’re back, then,’ I say, like an idiot. I struggle into a sitting position and clutch my pink pyjamas across my chest in case they’re gaping open. In the mirror I can see that my hair is all flat on one side and sticking up in a horrid peak on the other.

Sol doesn’t speak. He just carries on looking at me. I can’t read the look. It’s not anger,
but he’s not smiling either.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘I had to tell them. They were getting in a real state about you. Your father was . . .’

At the mention of his father Sol gets up and walks over to my attic window. He places his hands on the sill and grips it, shoulders tense and hunched, back turned towards me.

Then he turns around and feels in his pocket, producing a scrap of paper and a pen. He scrawls something and hands it to me. I can’t take it, so he drops it on the bed instead.

I thought I could trust you
, it says.
I thought you understood. You lost your mother too!

He’s heading for the door. I can’t leave it like that.

‘Hey, I do understand,’ I say. My voice is all crusty and low, full of sleep.

Sol snatches the paper back and adds something on the other side.

You don’t know what it’s like living with my father
, it says.

I think of Gino with his dark eyes like Sol’s and his gold earring.

‘He was really worried about you,’ I say. ‘He was here every day asking questions.’

Sol laughs at this, a soundless laugh that involves his shoulders jerking up and down and his mouth opening and closing.

He grabs my diary off the bedside table and rips out a blank sheet.

‘Hey,’ I protest, but only in a quiet voice. The way Sol’s looking, I know I’m in no position to wind him up.

Sol passes me the paper. I wrap a tissue round my hand, take it between my thumb and fingernail and hold it under the lamp.

I’ll tell you how much my father cares about me
, it says.
Enough to kill my mother right in front of me. That’s how much.

Then he sinks down on to the floor and puts his hands over his head and starts to shake.

It’s past midnight and I’m sitting on the wooden floorboards of my room without even a towel beneath my cold buttocks in their thin pyjamas and I’m sitting as close to Sol as possible without actually touching him.

I want to touch him, though. In my head I see another Zelah. Not the podgy-cheeked squashy-haired one with the flat chest. This is another taller, more beautiful Zelah with a bigger chest and lovely smooth dark hair. In my head this Zelah has got her arms round Sol and he’s got his head on her shoulder and she can feel all the warmth of his hard, thin body pressed up against her . . .

Like that’s ever going to happen.

There are about a million bits of paper
scattered around our feet. On them lies the story of Sol’s life.

He’s told me how his parents used to run an Italian restaurant in London and how they were happy even though they had screaming rows and chucked big white plates at one another.

He’s told me about his dad saving up two years to buy a sports car because he was car mad and how his dad used to wash and polish that car every Sunday afternoon until you could see your reflection in the bonnet.

He’s told me how, after one of their screaming rows, his father stormed out to the car and slammed the gears into reverse so that he could go for a drive around the block to cool down.

He’s told me about the scream and the heavy thump against the back of the car and the horrible moment of complete silence before his father got out, yelling his mother’s name, and ran into the road.

He’s told me how he watched all this, aged ten, from the front doorstep.

He saw the limpness of his mother’s head as she dangled from his father’s arms. Heard the roaring and crying coming from his father. Witnessed the panic to dial 999 and the wait for the ambulance.

Sol saw the body being carried away under a green sheet.

They covered up her face, he wrote. I never saw her again. That was the day I lost my voice.

Light creeps into my bedroom. We’ve stayed up all night.

I’m telling Sol some of my memories of Dad.

‘We used to have a special Father and Daughter Day,’ I say. ‘The best one was when I was about eight. We went to the Natural History Museum together and saw the stuffed polar bear. Then we sat in the café perched on
these really high stools and Dad let me have a bottle of pink Cresta with a straw.’

I pause here for a second. I’m thinking that there must actually have been a time when I’d have just drunk through a straw without thinking about Germ Alert or Dirt Alert first.

Sol grabs another blank page from my diary and writes
When did you stop having the special days?

That’s easy.

‘After Mum died,’ I say. ‘Even though I kind of needed them even more then.’

I tell Sol about Mum and how she lost her hair and grew puffy and yellow and then withered away into a skeleton while Dad drank even more. I tell him about how I’ve fallen out with Fran and how she’s not who I thought she was. The words just keep on pouring out of me. Of course it helps that Sol can’t but in unless he writes something on a scrap of paper. He’s a good listener.

As weak strains of sunlight begin to filter in over my floorboards I hear the Doc go downstairs and fill the kettle.

Sol makes to stand up, unsteady. I catch a whiff of sweat and tobacco and stale clothing.

Then I do something really weird. Something I haven’t done for years.

I reach out and grab his hand for a moment. The skin feels cold, smooth and stretchy under my fingers.

‘You’ll be OK,’ I say, letting go of the hand.

I wade through bits of crumpled paper and hop back beneath my cold duvet. It’s six in the morning and I have to get up in two hours to begin my rituals.

Sol nods and walks towards the door, yawning.

He stops just before opening it. He turns to where I’m already half asleep in my bed and gives me a grin.

‘Hey, Zelah,’ he says in a deep gruff voice.

I jump out of my skin.

‘Thanks.’

A
fter that night with Sol, things are OK between us.

He still refuses to speak in front of the others, but if we meet on the stairs he barks out a brief, ‘Hi,’ and gives me a scowling smile.

He’s lent me his iPod without me asking and after I’ve done therapy he makes a point of sticking his head round my bedroom door and asking me if I’m OK.

It’s not just Sol who’s getting better. Everyone is thrilled with Alice because the Sunday after Sol gets back she eats a small bowl of cereal and manages to keep it down. Her
reward is another small bowl of muesli for supper but she eats that too, flushing with effort, encouraged by Josh.

Lib’s still up in her room most of the time. I miss her grin and ask the Doc is there’s anything wrong, but she just says, ‘Lib’s working through some issues,’ which in this place is about as useful as somebody saying, ‘There’s weather outside.’

Caro is as grumpy as ever, but she offers to cut my hair at the weekend. My frizzy fringe is so long that I’ve taken to pinning it up with flowery clips. The result is far from flattering. It exposes my big forehead and makes my face look pale against the black hair.

‘She’s very good,’ says the Doc, seeing my doubtful expression. ‘Honestly. She’ll take years off you. Not that you really need that, at fourteen.’

‘Sit still, will you?’ says Caro.

I’m up in her bedroom, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. Caro’s tucked a clean green towel round my shoulders and is snipping away at the split ends and dry sections of my hair.

I’ve made her dip the scissors in disinfectant and have checked the blades about a hundred times for any specks of dirt.

‘OCD, you freak me out, man,’ says Caro as she sprays some sort of cold liquid on my head and combs it through. It smells of peaches and blackcurrants.

I watch as little black curls of my hair bounce off my shoulders and drop on to the floor where they lie like shrivelled slugs.

‘Don’t get in a state — I’ll sweep it up,’ says Caro, interpreting my expression. She bends down behind me and bites her lip as she concentrates on trimming my hair into a straight line across the tops of my shoulders.

‘OK, now we layer it,’ she says, coming round to the front and using the very ends of her scissors to cut my hair into shaped sections around my face. They cling to my face in little black feathery strands. As her sleeves fall backwards I can see that Caro’s arms are starting to scab over.

‘Where’d you learn to cut hair?’ I try to imagine Caro working in a salon. Impossible. She’d spit in the coffee and spread vicious gossip between clients before slagging off all the orange-skinned celebrities in the glossy salon magazines.

Then again, perhaps she’d be perfect for the job.

‘My mother was a hairdresser,’ says Caro. She says this in a very short, unemotional way as if she’s saying, ‘That’ll be three pounds fifty, please,’ in a greengrocer’s shop. It doesn’t invite any further conversation so I sit on my hands
and try not to let my flip-flops touch the pile of dead hair on the ground.

When Caro’s finished, she looks around for a bottle of styling spray.

‘I’ll have to borrow one from Lib,’ she says. ‘Back in a sec.’

I flap my feet up and down and look around, bored.