Adorkable (40 page)

An hour later Jeane was in the house, laden down with a Fortnum & Mason’s hamper, a present from her agent which she re-gifted to Mum and Dad, and a heap of brightly coloured crap for the girls (she was always being sent heaps of brightly coloured crap by PRs who wanted a mention on her blog): hairslides to toy robots to mounds of sweets that sent them into ear-splitting squeals of delight. There was nothing for me but as she was ceremonially escorted by Melly and Alice to the spare bedroom to unpack, I checked my iPhone (I’d been checking it every five minutes since I set it up), there was an
email from iTunes to let me know that Jeane had sent me a £100 gift card.

Even though she’d only had an hour to pack, she’d used part of that time to write me a long, detailed list of all the apps I
had
to buy.

It wasn’t like she was magically forgiven or that I wanted to start something up again that I never should have started in the first place, but I couldn’t fault Jeane’s generosity. Even during that argument on a street corner in Greenpoint, even though she’d hurled insults at me, not once had she reminded me that if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have been standing on a street corner in Greenpoint in the first place.

And when I thought of New York, I remembered that I had a ton of sweets bought at Dylan’s Candy Bar, which Jeane had stuffed in my bag when she’d packed for me. I could give them to her as a Christmas present, but it was very hard to find a good time to hand them over.

The first evening Jeane crashed out ridiculously early again and on Boxing Day she was more interested in helping Mum concoct huge turkey sandwiches smothered in chutneys, pickles and other condiments. When Great Aunt Mary arrived and
Alice point-blank refused to go near her (which was perfectly justified because she smelt like she’d been left out in the rain), Jeane took the girls to the park with their new scooters.

Then when she got back, she bonded with Great Aunt Mary over her pink rinse and once Great Aunt Mary had been ferried back to Ealing and Mum had spritzed a whole can of Febreeze over the armchair where she’d been sitting, she and the girls and Jeane commandeered the sofa and started watching musicals. Proper old musicals in glorious technicolour where everyone kept breaking into these big song and dance numbers about having a night on the town and singing in the bloody rain. It was horrible. Usually, Melly and Alice counted as one person and the sexes were evenly represented, but with Jeane in residence the power balance had shifted and Dad retreated to his study to watch a documentary about leprosy and I lay on my bed playing
Angry Birds
until I couldn’t see straight.

So Jeane stayed out of my way and I stayed out of hers until the next morning when Melly and Alice were off to an all-day birthday party and Mum and Dad were braving the sales to buy a new washing machine.

‘I filled up your car with petrol the other night,’ Dad said as we were finishing breakfast. ‘Why don’t you and Jeane go out somewhere?’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Jeane said through a mouthful of toast and jam. She had let Melly and Alice do her hair, which now had at least twenty clips and bows in it. ‘I can amuse myself for a few hours.’

‘It would be nice if you two did something,’ Mum said with a pointed look at me. ‘And it would be really nice if you
stopped playing that bloody game with the pigs and the birds and the incessant noise, Michael.’

I looked at Jeane who looked back at me with a blank expression and then we both looked at my mother who had her ‘My word is law’ face on and half an hour later we were in my car.

‘So where do you want to go?’ I asked Jeane politely, because she was
so
in with my mother I’d be in trouble if I were rude. Not that I was going to be rude but the whole thing was weird. And Jeane was being weird. Not once in the last thirty-six hours had she lectured anyone on obscure girl groups or the God-like genius that was Haribo and I didn’t want to talk about what had happened with us or what was going to happen with us because we’d start arguing and so I didn’t know what to say to her.

‘You don’t have to take me anywhere,’ she said as she crossed her arms. ‘Like, you could take me to a café and I could hang out there for a couple of hours and no one would ever know.’

Then I’d have to find another café to sit in for a couple of hours in case Mum and Dad came back early, which was just stupid.

‘Look, we can handle spending some time together, can’t we?’

‘Well, yeah, we should be able to, but it’s going to be hard when you’re not really talking to me,’ Jeane said calmly.

‘No, you’re not talking to
me
,’ I said, and I wished I didn’t sound so sulky.

‘I didn’t think you wanted me to talk to you.’

I didn’t know what I wanted any more except not to get tied up in one of Jeane’s conversational knots. ‘I’m starting the car now. Where shall we go?’

‘I suppose we could go to the seaside. Going to the seaside in
winter is quite cool, though everything will probably be closed,’ Jeane mused. Inevitably she started doing something with her iPhone, then she switched on the Sat Nav I’d inherited from Dad, who’d got a swizzy new one for Christmas. ‘How does this work? Do I just put in a postcode?’

‘Yeah.’ I took my eyes off the road long enough to jab at it then watched Jeane tap in a postcode. ‘Where’s that?’

She frowned. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there. It’s not going to be the funnest road trip ever but it can be your Christmas present to me.’

‘I didn’t get you a present because I didn’t know my parents were suddenly going to adopt you! I still have the sweets I bought in New York, I’ve been waiting for a chance to give them to you.’

‘It wasn’t a dig and I did ask you before I turned up.’

‘I could hardly say no.’ I glanced over at Jeane. She was sitting there with her arms tightly folded and her lips moving silently. I swear she was counting up to ten so she wouldn’t start shouting at me. ‘I really don’t mind you staying over. I just don’t understand why you’d want to and, to be honest, that whole scene with the shower door freaked me out.’

‘Yeah, that scene with the shower door was quite an epiphany,’ Jeane said unhelpfully and then she started asking me questions about Cambridge and if I was going to do the internship in San Francisco and when the Sat Nav told me to take the next exit off the motorway, I realised that we’d managed a whole hour of not arguing.

Jeane asked me to stop at a garage, then got back in the car with a bag of Haribo Starmix and a bunch of flowers. ‘Are they for my mum?’

‘Nope
,’ she said, and I waited for her to start asking me questions again but she just stared at the route on the Sat Nav. We were only a couple of miles away from our destination and I still wanted to know where we were going, but she didn’t seem to want to tell me.

Take the next left. You have arrived at your destination
, the Sat Nav informed me as I pulled into a cemetery. The sign said it was a green burial ground but it looked like a cemetery to me.

‘What are we doing here? Are your grandparents buried here?’

Jeane shook her head. ‘Andrew. I told you about him.’ She unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘Though now that we’re here I realise I don’t have a clue where his grave is. We’re looking for a bench and a wild cherry tree. Do you know what a wild cherry tree even looks like?’

It was freezing cold with a damp, vicious wind rolling in from the open fields and the ground squelched underneath our feet as we peered at gravestones. They weren’t laid out in neat rows but dotted randomly about. It was nice, I suppose, that each grave had its own space and they weren’t all crammed together, but it was still depressing to be wandering around a graveyard, even if it was an ecologically aware graveyard.

Eventually we found the right grave, after we’d done a complete loop and were almost back at the car. I stood to one side as Jeane crouched down and wiped at the stone with the sleeve of her fun fur anorak.

ANDREW SMITH

1983 – 1994

Cherished son, beloved brother, taken too soon. Rest with the angels, our brave, beautiful boy.

There
was a wooden bench under a tree, possibly a wild cherry tree, which I sat on as Jeane removed a desiccated bouquet from a vase on the plinth of the grave and arranged her own flowers in it. Then she stayed squatting for several long moments, which must have been hell on her knees, until she slowly straightened up and walked over to me.

‘I realised that this was the first Christmas that no one had visited his grave,’ she said, as she sat down next to me. It was even colder now, a seeping wet cold that felt as if it were burrowing into my bones, and Jeane was shivering so I put my arm round her, not in a copping-a-feel kinda way but more like a boy-scouts-who-huddle-together-for-warmth-when-they-get-separated-from-the-rest-of-the-troop-on-an-Outward-Bound-course kinda way. She immediately huddled against me. ‘The only person who could come this year was me.’

‘Does it make you sad?’ I asked curiously, because she didn’t seem sad so much as thoughtful.

‘This place isn’t exactly a laugh riot, but it is a nice place to come so people can feel close to the people they’ve lost.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Though, really, you shouldn’t
have
to drop everything to come here to remember someone. They’re either dead and that’s it, or if there is some kind of afterlife then they’re always with you.’ She nodded her head in the direction of the grave. ‘I mean, that’s just his bones, it’s not him.’

‘Oh, Jeane, Jeane, Jeane …’ I said and I honestly didn’t know what else to say. ‘Something is really wrong, isn’t it?’

‘It really is but I’m going to make it right,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t want to die and have no one to visit my grave.’

‘You’re not going to die,’ I said and I tried to make it sound
like a joke, but now I was worried that she was suicidal or something.

‘Well, of course I’m not going to die,’ she said with a touch of the old scathe back in her voice, which was a relief. ‘Unless I get mown down by a bus, I plan to be around for ages, but I don’t want my life to be long and lonely and the way I’m going, I
will
be lonely. No, worse than that. I’m going to be alone.’

‘You won’t be alone. You have loads of friends who—’

‘People I know off the internet,’ Jeane reminded me dryly. ‘Michael, even my own parents don’t love me.’

‘But they do! They’re your mum and dad, they have to.’

‘Just ’cause they’re
supposed
to doesn’t mean they do,’ Jeane said. ‘And, yeah, I have friends, but I spent Christmas Day with your family who barely know me and the one invite I did have got cancelled because of a fight between a middle-aged man who went menty after doing too many drugs and his alcoholic perv of a friend. That’s not cool. And the night before, when the shower door broke, I thought: I’m seventeen and I’m all on my own and it’s just too much responsibility. I kid myself that I’m fine and I’m coping but my life is just a flimsy façade held together with Haribo and Pritt Stick. When I really needed help, there was no one to call.’

‘You called me,’ I told her. ‘Or was I the last resort?’

‘The very last of my last resorts but I think I knew, deep down, that you’d come, even though you hate me right now.’

I tightened my arm round her. ‘I don’t
hate
you. You’re not my favourite person in the world but maybe you’re starting to grow on me again.’

‘Yeah, like a fungal infection.’

‘You’re
not
quite
that bad,’ I said, and Jeane looked up at me and grinned. ‘And you’re only focusing on the bad stuff because it’s Christmas and when you feel crap at Christmas it’s a special, powerful feeling like crap. There’s loads of good things happening for you. The TV show and the book and the website – that will teach me not to call you an absurd media creation.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry about that, by the way, and all the other things I said.’

Jeane bit her lip and stared down at the ground. ‘Well, thanks for apologising, and I’m sorry that I said … well,
hurled
loads of insults at you, but pretending that you didn’t know me on Twitter, that was not cool.’

I wriggled a bit and hoped that Jeane would think that I was trying to get more comfortable rather than squirming in shame.

‘I know, but honestly, it didn’t start as some evil scheme to get one over on you and you were so much nicer to me on Twitter than you were in real life. Then when we started to hang out and stuff, you were still much nicer to me on Twitter than in real life. Like, you were less adorkable and more adorable. And it’s like I said at the airport in New York, I’d let it go on for so long that, in the end, I couldn’t tell you that we were Twitter friends.’