Broken Soup (12 page)

The next day started out like all the rest. I turned off the alarm and sleepwalked to the kitchen to make Stroma's lunch and have a cup of tea. We had an argument about oatmeal because she asked for it and then wouldn't eat it. Then I started stressing out about being late (again). I had to give her a piggyback to the bus stop because she refused to run. She was getting good at that, digging her heels in and winning. Mum was still in bed when we left. We crept in to say good-bye to her and crept out again. A pretty ordinary morning, really, nothing to write home about.

After that, I had a lecture about my timekeeping, double English, an apple because I hadn't actually eaten any breakfast (too busy arguing about Stroma's), double biology, and then lunch, when I went to find Bee.

She wasn't there. I called her.

“I couldn't face it,” she said. “I didn't sleep so well. And Sonny's babysitter was sick so I stayed home with him.”

I asked her if she needed anything. If I could bring anything around.

“I need to talk to you some more. Just you and me, no Stroma. I hope you don't mind.”

“Of course not. I'll sort something out.”

After school I called Harper. He said his phone ringing made him jump. He said it sounded like giant crickets. He had me laughing straightaway.

“I'm sorry about yesterday,” I said.

“Forget it. Me too. How's your mum?”

“Asleep, last time I looked.”

“I had a good time,” he said. “It meant a lot, you showing me Jack's room and everything, so thank you.”

“You know Bee's never seen it.”

He made this noise, this outbreath that meant “Poor Bee.” “I'd like to meet her,” he said. “I don't know her.”

“There's time for that.” I said she wasn't at school. I said she needed to talk some more. I asked would he look after Stroma maybe?

“I can do it tomorrow. Is that OK?”

I was at Stroma's school gates. I could see her lining up in the playground, talking nonstop to Mrs. Hall. She
waved at me, jumped up and down.

“Got to go. Tomorrow is perfect. Thanks, Harper.”

“Bye, beautiful,” he said.

 

As we turned into our street I saw Harper's ambulance outside the house and I thought, He couldn't wait to see me, and I sped up. But I couldn't have seen it right because then the ambulance put on its lights and siren, pulled away, and hammered past us. Stroma put her hands over her ears.

Dad's car was there. Mrs. Hardwick was standing at our front door like a policeman at the prime minister's house, only dressed in tweed and white as a sheet. I asked her what was going on.

“You can't go in,” she said.

Stroma put her hand into mine. “What's happened?” I said.

Mrs. Hardwick just shook her head. “You can't go in. You've got to come to my house.”

“Where's my mum?” I said.

Mrs. Hardwick's eyes followed the path of the ambulance. “Your dad's with her,” she said. “And he told me not to let you in.”

I crouched down in front of Stroma. She was starting to snivel. I held both her arms and I looked into her eyes and I said, “Go with Mrs. H. I'll be right there. Please, Stroma. It's OK.”

Mrs. Hardwick was still standing there like all five foot two of her could stop my getting into my own house. She said, “You really shouldn't. It's for your own good.”

I felt very calm right in the middle, like the eye of a storm. My hands were shaking. I said, “No offense, but I've been running this family for a while now and I think I'm old enough to look after myself.”

She didn't argue and I was glad she didn't try. I got the keys out of my bag and waited for her to move out of the way. I opened the door and closed it behind me and leaned my back against it, just breathing. I could hear them retreating down the path, Mrs. Hardwick's voice, oddly gentle, and Stroma's little sniffing noises.

 

Mum.

 

I dumped my bag and walked across the hallway and into the kitchen. My steps sounded louder than they should have on the slate floor. Everything was tidy and clean, just like I left it. She must have had a cup of tea. There was a mug on the side, rinsed, upside down. It left a ring when I picked it up.

The sitting room was tidy too. She'd folded her blankets and made a neat pile on the sofa. Usually it was me who did that. The TV was off and the fish were there watching me. I left the room and took the stairs three at a time to my landing.

There was a note on my bed in an envelope, in Mum's handwriting. That's when time doubled up on itself and I really started moving. Mum didn't write letters. Mum didn't have anything to say.

I left it where it was and this strange noise came from the back of my mouth that I didn't even connect with me for a second until I realized I was making it, and I sounded really scared.

I can't remember taking the next set of stairs. I burst into her room. The bed was made. There was no dirty laundry on the floor. It wasn't normal.

The bathroom was where she did it.

I should have noticed the blood on the stairs, but I didn't see it till later.

The bathroom looked like Bee's bathroom the day we printed Jack's picture, the day she fitted that red lightbulb and the whole place drowned in one color.

The bathroom was red.

The bath was full of red water. Red had run down the sides and onto the mat on the floor. Red made patterns on the square white tiles, on the shower curtain. I didn't think a body could hold that much blood.

I had blood on my hands, but I didn't remember touching anything. The door handle was bloody. Everywhere was wet with cooled steam and blood, and there was this smell, like the butcher's, like metal, like earth.

I don't know what I did next. It's like things just
went blank because when I got to Mrs. Hardwick's, time had passed differently for them. Stroma was eating toast on the best rug and watching the TV. She didn't see me. Mrs. Hardwick hugged me when she opened the door. I remember how soft and powdery her skin felt, and the strange sweetness of her perfume.

“Where is she?” I said.

“UCH.”

“Can you keep Stroma?”

She nodded and put twenty quid in my hand. “Get a taxi, dear,” she said.

 

I had blood on my face. I looked at my reflection in the cab window. I must have wiped my eyes and got it on myself. I looked like a warrior. I tried to get it off, but I just smeared it in with my snot and my tears and the blood on my hands. The cab driver kept looking at me in his mirror and I was thinking, Don't talk to me don't look at me don't ask me a thing.

I got out and gave him the twenty quid and I didn't wait for my change. Then time slowed down again when I hit reception. The woman at the desk took what felt like three hours to look up at me.

I said, “Where's Jane Clark? I'm looking for my mum.” And she took another three hours looking at the computer and fiddling around. I couldn't slow my breathing down.

Then Dad came out through some double doors and he had red on his hands and red on his shirt and he was trying to wipe his hands on this used-up piece of tissue and he was crying.

Please don't let her be dead. Please, God, don't let her be dead.
I started to shake like there was an earthquake in there, but it was only underneath me.

I've thought about it since, how come Dad didn't know about Mum, how come I didn't tell him. Of course I have. And I feel bad about it. I really do.

I've thought about why I tried to deal with it all myself and just messed up everything, how I managed to turn real life into broken soup instead of just breakfast.

I must have had my reasons, but I'm not going to try and name them.

Who knows? Sometimes you open your eyes and realize you've been going through life with them closed. And what you thought was the world was just the inside of your head all along.

Mum wasn't dead. Not for lack of trying.

She wasn't dead because of Dad letting himself in the back door when nobody answered, walking around the house, ending up in the bathroom.

“I nearly didn't go up there,” he said. “I thought everyone was out.”

“Why did you go around?”

“I wanted to see you. I left work early. I wanted to be there when you got home from school,” he said.

“She left a note on my bed.”

He said, “What if I hadn't gone upstairs?”

He said, “Where did my life go—breaking into my own house, finding the person I love like that in the bath?”

He had my hand in his and we stayed in the hallway, drinking rank, scalding coffee, blinking under the fluorescent lights like lab rats.

“I'm sorry, Rowan,” he said, and he was studying my hand like he'd never really looked at it before. He smiled and he was so hollowed out and unhappy, and I smiled back, but I bet I looked the same.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

 

About eight o'clock my phone rang. I took it because it was Bee. I had to go outside because phones weren't allowed in the building and people were giving me stick for it just by looking.

There was a strange half-world outside the hospital. Patients were wandering around in their backless gowns, drinking coffee at silver tables across the street, standing at ATMs, smoking with their pajamas on. Like ghosts in the real world, like extras on a film set.

“Hey,” Bee said. “Where are you?”

“I can't talk really.”

“Why, what's up?”

“I'm at UCH,” I said. “My mum's in the hospital.”

I could hear her breathe in. “What's happened?”

“She cut herself,” I said, and I started to cry again. People were looking.

I said would she do me a favor. I said Stroma was at Mrs. Hardwick's and she didn't know her very well, and she didn't know anything, really, only that Mum was in an ambulance. I said, “She's there on her own and she's going to be scared. Will you get her? Can she stay with you and Carl?” I couldn't speak properly because my voice wouldn't stay in one place.

“Of course she can,” Bee said. “I'll go right now. We'll pick her up in the car. Give me the number.”

I did and I asked her not to tell Stroma anything. “Just say Mum's fine.”

“Is she?”

“I don't know.”

Bee asked if it was an accident and I didn't say anything. “Oh God. Oh, Rowan.” She was all muffled like she had her hand over her mouth. I wanted to stop talking now.

“Let me know when you've got Stroma,” I said. “I want to make sure she's all right.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Who's looking after you?” she said.

“My dad's here,” I told her. “And anyway, I'm sleepwalking. I'm not awake.”

I stayed there for a minute, looking at the rain falling out of the dark in the orange lamplight, and the lamplight in the puddles, rush hour, and the endless rhythm of people getting on and off buses, crossing roads in the traffic, like a pulse. And then I turned and went back into the hard glare and the swinging doors and the shiny floors and the waiting.

 

I must have slept where I sat because the nurse woke me up talking to Dad. She was saying things about “immediate risk” and “possible nerve damage.” She said Mum was sedated and that the psychiatric people would be assessing her as soon as they could.

I said, “Do you want to know what drugs she's on?” The nurse looked at me with this tight smile. “For sleeping and stuff. I've got a list with the dosage and everything.”

The nurse said someone would come and get that information from me later. Her smile didn't budge, and she and Dad both kept on looking at me for a second too long. I closed my eyes and pretended not to be there until she'd gone. Her shoes made a squeaking sound on the floor, really loud and high-pitched.
White lace-ups. I couldn't have worn them.

Nobody came, of course. I gave the list to Dad and he read it for a while, then put it in his wallet. He said, “Why didn't you tell me, Rowan?”

I didn't answer. I kept my eyes shut and I didn't speak.

 

Bee texted me to say that Stroma was fine. She said
CALL ME IF U WANT OR NEED
, but I didn't know what to say so I didn't.

I told Dad that Stroma was at Bee's. I told him she'd be happier there so he didn't have to worry. For a second he almost looked like he'd forgotten who Stroma was.

He said, “You should go home and get some sleep,” but I didn't want to be alone with the bathroom, and when I said so, he went pale and he put his head in his hands and breathed out hard, like a horse.

“It was hard carrying her out,” he said, and he was looking straight at the memory of doing it. I figured it was him that got blood on the floor and the walls and the door and the stairs. I imagined Mum just bleeding quietly into the water.

We slept in our chairs, on and off. There was a draft and it was noisy, and everyone we saw had this shocked look about them, like this wasn't the day they'd been expecting by a long way.

Jack and I used to watch a show called
Casualty
and
play a game. You had to watch the first five minutes of the program while they set up the stories—lonely old lady with six cats and a rusty can opener; victim of a bully finding a gun in a garbage bin—and then you had to predict who was heading for the ambulance, and how, and if they'd see out the day.
Casualty
itself was pretty rubbish so we'd turn the sound down and play cards and wait to see who was right.

I didn't see any old ladies with tetanus or any gunshot wounds. Mainly I saw the wall in front of me, a sickly sea-foam green with pockmarks and little pinholes, like the back of Jack's door where he used to keep his dartboard.

 

In the morning Harper came.

I thought I was dreaming. I got up and my body was stiff and kinked out from living in a plastic chair. I said, “What are you doing here?” and then I held on to him and I wouldn't let go.

His voice in my ear said, “Sssh,” just quietly, over and over, like the sound of a seashell. He smelled of cut grass.

I said, “How did you know?” and he said, “Bee.”

He told me she came on her bike, rode around looking for him, banged on the window to wake him up.

Bee did that for me.

Harper took his jacket off and I put it on. It was
only then I realized how cold I was. He asked me if I needed anything, something to eat, a drink of water.

“A time machine maybe,” I said.

He asked me if I found her.

“No, my dad did. I just went in after.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Dad was watching us from where he was sitting. Watching us and staring straight through us at the same time.

“I was doing everything I could. I was helping.”

“It wasn't you, Rowan. There's nothing you could have done.”

“Do you think it was us in Jack's room? Do you think it was that?”

“It's grief,” he said. “It's chemicals in the brain. It wasn't us and it wasn't you.”

 

A nurse was talking to Dad. I went over and she said it all again, like a waitress doing the specials. Mum was awake, but heavily sedated. We could go in, but one at a time, and only for a few minutes. She was very drained.

Dad went in first. He squeezed my hand like he was wishing himself luck.

I went back to where Harper was standing. I said, “What's it like outside? What kind of day is it going to be?”

“It's a good one,” he said. “Come and see.”

You couldn't see the sky from where we'd been all night. You couldn't see outside at all. I don't know if that was to protect the healthy from the sick or to stop the sick seeing what they were missing.

Harper was right. It was a good morning. Big blue-violet sky, last night's rain shining on the road, the gaps between the buildings day bright and peppered with cranes. People moved past us double-time, oblivious, on the phone, scanning the paper, sipping coffee, one last smoke before work. Business as usual except for those of us who couldn't remember what day it was. I wondered if I should phone school or if that was Dad's job now, if they'd even believe me.

“Do you think things will start to get better now?” I asked Harper, as if he knew.

He was squinting into the sun and said, “Well, I suppose they could have been worse.”

After a while, Dad came out to join us. He looked so strange in the outside light, with his bloodstained shirt and his tearstained face, like an actor playing my dad, like the person I didn't know underneath.

He said, “Go in and see her if you want to. You don't have to.”

I left them there together, Dad and Harper. I was too busy controlling my breathing to wonder what they'd find to talk about.

Mum was lying on her back with her hands palm up at her sides. Tears fell the shortest way from her eyes to the pillow, straight down, making little pools in her ears. I bent down and she put her arms around my neck and I kissed her cheek and I shook from not crying.

I said, “Don't do that again, Mum.” She closed her eyes and let her arms fall back on the bed.

I said I was sorry if I'd done the wrong thing and she shook her head, and the tears moved faster to the pillow, like rain on the car window when you're driving through it. She didn't ask about Stroma, but I told her anyway. I said she was being looked after. I said, “She doesn't know.”

After that I didn't know what to say, so I kissed her again and I smoothed her hair with my fingers. It was odd being able to touch her. She didn't pull away while I did it. She didn't look at me.

Afterward I said to Dad that I didn't think Stroma should see her. Not yet. He said one of us should go and tell Stroma that everything was OK, and could that be me because he wasn't ready to go yet, he wanted to stay here with Mum.

Harper said he'd take me to Bee's. I wanted to stop by the house and pick up a few things for Mum, like her toothbrush and some pajamas, maybe a long-sleeved cardigan or a dressing gown. I thought it might
help. I kept talking about it in the hospital parking lot.

“How much sleep have you had?” Harper asked me.

I didn't know. “Not much.”

He made me a bed in the back of the van. He folded the sofa down and got out the bedding. I was too tired to argue. The sheets smelled of him. I wrote him a list of what I'd thought Mum needed and I gave him my key. I fell asleep with the purring of the road beneath me.

 

Stroma got under the covers and woke me. She lay on her side in front of me and put my arm around her waist, shifting to make the same shape with herself as I had, to fit exactly. I snuggled in a bit toward her, opened my eyes.

“How's Mum?” she said, like she knew without even looking I was awake.

“She's sleeping,” I said.

“What happened?”

“She hurt herself in the bathroom.”

“How?”

“I don't know. Maybe she fell.”

Stroma giggled. “Silly.”

“Yep,” I said. “Silly.”

Harper pulled out into the traffic and me and Stroma rolled a little in the bed.

“I like Carl,” Stroma said. I nodded into her hair. “We did flower pressing. Guess what Bee showed me,”
she said, turning to lie on her back, all elbows and knees. “Pictures of Jack. Loads and loads of pictures of Jack.”

“How lovely,” I said.

“Can I tell Mum about Bee being Jack's girlfriend?”

“No,” I said. “Don't talk about Jack with Mum, not today.”

“Why not?”

“She's too tired, Stroma. You don't get much sleep in a hospital.”

“Why? You need sleep when you're sick. That's what Mrs. H said. She said Mum would be having a nice long sleep. You said she was asleep.”

“Just don't talk about Jack, Stroma. It makes her sad.”

“
Everything
makes Mum sad,” Stroma said, and she moved away from me slightly, kept her eyes on the roof of the van.

I asked Harper if he got Mum's stuff and he pointed at a shopping bag on the seat next to him. I sat up and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was after twelve. “What took us so long?” I said.

Harper looked at me in his mirror. “I had a little cleanup.”

I didn't get it for a minute.

“I went to get her toothbrush,” he said. “I couldn't leave things like that.”

“Like what?” Stroma asked, while I tried to tell Harper how I felt just by looking.

“Your mum made some splashes when she fell,” Harper said. “The bathroom was a bit wet.”

I got out of the bed and I put my arms around his shoulders from behind. Harper rested his head against mine. “I can't believe you did that,” I said quietly.

Stroma was going, “Did what? Did what?”

Neither of us answered.