Broken Soup (4 page)

Market Road was long and the buildings were fairly spaced out. There was a massive complex set well back from the road—six huge buildings with cheerful names like Ravenscar and Coldbrooke. I tried to look purposeful (but not businesslike) and I kept going. I was beginning to wonder if 71 even existed. And then I passed it. It was on a corner, a smashed-up, boarded-up, covered-in-bird-shit old pub. The signs had been painted out in black and the number 71 was daubed on the front door in white gloss. It didn't look like anybody but the pigeons lived there. There was no way I was going in.

I stopped at the curb a little way past and turned around. I was balancing my bike with one foot on the ground, looking for my mobile to call Bee and tell her it was a big nothing, when I saw the van parked outside the building, around the corner. It was an old
ambulance with long double doors at the back and stripy curtains. The driver's door was open onto the pavement and Harper Greene was sitting there, his seat pushed back, both feet up on the windshield. He was reading a book. For maybe ten seconds I stood quite still. His hair was cut so short you could see the skin beneath, the shape of his skull. I liked his face. I could break it down and say his nose was straight and his eyes were brown and all that, but it wouldn't work like his face worked, together all at once. Like Jack used to say when something good happened, you had to be there. I watched the slow movements of his breathing, his quick eyes scanning the page. I breathed in hard and I thought, What would Bee do?

When I got off my bike and started pushing it toward him, he looked around and smiled like he'd been expecting me. Then he got up and disappeared over the back of his seat and opened the double doors at the back, as if that was the way you received guests in an old ambulance, like everyone knew that was the way you answered the door.

We said hello at the same time. I wasn't doing a great job of looking him in the eye.

“I'm Harper,” he said.

I nodded and said, “I know,” but I was supposed to say, “I'm Rowan,” so I did, when I finally realized.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he put his hands
in his pockets, I guess instead of shaking mine.

“Is this where you live?” I said.

“At the moment,” he said. “I move around.”

“Market Road?” I said.

And he laughed and said, “Yeah, very scenic, but the parking is free.”

I asked him where he was from. He said, “New York. You?”

“Around here,” I said. I pointed at the pub. “Who lives in there?”

“Oh, no one,” he said. “I guess they moved out a while ago. It's wrecked in there.”

“I like your ambulance.”

He smiled. “Me too.” He said he got it “from a guy” for hardly anything because the guy was going back to New Zealand and he wanted it to have a good home. It was strange, Harper talking about stuff while the thing I wanted him to talk about just waited.

“Do you want to come in?” he said.

“I don't think so.”

I was still holding on to my handlebars. He asked me if I was worried about my bike. I shook my head. I said, “Why did you give it to me?”

“What? The thing you dropped?”

“I didn't drop anything.”

“I saw you,” he said, and he was smiling, like he couldn't believe I was arguing with what he knew to
be true. “You dropped it on the doorstep of the shop and I picked it up.”

I told him I thought it was a joke at first. “I thought you just gave stuff to people for a laugh. I thought you were trying to embarrass me in front of everyone.”

He said that would be too weird and we both laughed, but only a little.

“What's weird,” I said, “is that I've never seen that photo before. But it does belong to me.”

He asked me what I meant and I said, “It's of somebody I know.”

“Isn't that because you dropped it, because it was yours?” He smiled and held his hands out in front of him as if to say, Why are we still talking about this?

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I did, but I still haven't worked out how.”

“I don't get why that's hard. People drop things all the time.”

I got the feeling he was beginning to wonder about me—about my sanity, I mean. I said, “It's a picture of my brother, and my brother is dead.” I hoped really hard he wasn't going to say something cushiony.

“God, I'm sorry,” he said, and then, “Can I get you a drink?”

Part cushion, part nothing, which was fine.

I propped my bike against a wall and sat down in the doorway of the ambulance. While Harper was lifting the
lid off the little hidden stove and filling a kettle by pressing his foot down on the floor, I said, “Do you see why it's weird? That I never saw it before and you found it and it's of him?”

He said he really hadn't meant to freak me out. He said, “I guess you owned it without knowing.”

“Yeah, but even that's doing my head in. I wouldn't have it and then forget about it. It's a really amazing photo.”

“It's a mystery,” he said. “I get it. You want to solve it.”

We sat on the floor of the van with the back doors open and our feet on the ground. The tea was some spicy, gingery thing that came out of a packet covered in proverbs, but it tasted quite good.

He said, “Have you always lived around here?”

“Norf London girl,” I said, and he laughed.

“Upstate New York boy.”

I didn't know what to say about New York. I'd never been there. I didn't know what
upstate
meant. I said, “Wow,” or something just as vacant, and then I asked him how old he was. Eighteen last August, three months older than Jack. I said, “How did you get it together to do all this, leave home and travel around and everything?”

“I always wanted to do it,” he said. “The world's so big, you got to start early. I wanted to get moving, get away.”

“Get away from what?” I said, and he shrugged.

“Everything and nothing. I just wanted to move.”

I was rolling a bit of gravel around under my shoe. “Everything,” I said. “I'd like to get away from that too.”

There was a football match going on in the sports fields opposite. We could just see the players' heads bobbing around above the level of the wall.

“Just so you know,” he said, “it turns out not to be possible.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I don't know. You're always gonna be you—doesn't matter where in the world you are.”

I thought of Jack's “
too deep warning light
,” this thing he used to say when anyone got a bit of self-help on him, a bit “road less traveled.” It made me smile. If I'd known Harper better, I'd have told him what was so funny. I asked him where he'd been so far.

“I flew from New York to Paris. I wanted to go by boat, but it costs way too much. I wanted to be in the middle of an ocean. Nothing but water for weeks, see if I went crazy. Maybe another time. I stayed with a friend in Montparnasse for a while. Then I got the train here. I haven't been doing this too long. I'm pretty new at it.”

“Where are you going next?”

“I just got here, so nowhere for a month or so. I
want to go to Scotland, Norway, and Spain, and, well, wherever. Plus I've got to work when I can, when the money's low. We'll see. What about you?”

“Oh, nothing, nowhere,” I said. “I haven't done anything yet.” He seemed to find that funny so I didn't tell him it wasn't a joke.

He asked me about Mum. I wished he hadn't seen her that day, in the doctor's. I told him she wasn't like that, really, which was a lie. I told him they were adjusting her medication and it was just a question of waiting. I stuck up for her because I knew I should, but I wouldn't have believed a word of it if I was him.

He said, “Was that your sister with you?” and I said yes, and that with the Jack fallout and my dad going part-time on us, I'd pretty much been left in charge. I told him that my friends were getting bored with me because I couldn't hang around too much, and if I did, it was with a six-year-old in tow. I heard myself grumbling and complaining to this person I'd just met, and I was telling myself,
Stop it! Be funny, be cool. Stop doing this.

But it was true and I couldn't make it leave my head if it was there. While my friends were thinking about what their jeans looked like in their boots, I was wondering how much milk there was in the fridge. When they talked about makeup and boys, I was thinking laundry and kids' TV. I said, “I'm not much of a picnic to know anymore.”

Harper stood up and poured the rest of his tea on a straggly plant growing out of the curb. He said he'd be the judge of that, if it was OK by me.

At about six thirty I stood up and started fixing the lights onto my bike. I wasn't ready to leave at all. Harper said, “Did you want to stay and eat? I'm a not bad cook.”

“I can't. I have to get my sister. I have stuff to do.”

I thanked him for the photo. I said, “I've no idea where it came from, but I suppose it's mine and I'm glad to have it.”

“You're welcome,” he said. “I'm glad it was you.”

I wheeled out onto the darkening road, past the sad cases and the curb crawlers and the football players and Harper waving at me until he was out of sight.

I couldn't stop smiling.

 

When I got to Bee's, she said didn't I get her messages, that she'd sent three while I was gone. “Even I started to wonder if he was an ax wielder when I didn't hear back.”

I hadn't checked my phone. I didn't think she'd be worrying. “He lives in an ambulance,” I said because I knew she'd like that. “He's from New York.”

“Did you like him?”

“Yes, I liked him.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Not much. I wasn't there that long.”

“Yes you were,” Bee said. “You've been gone nearly three hours.”

“I suppose so. He's traveling. He's funny. He's very cool.”

“Told you,” she said.

“I liked him a lot.”

“How did it go?”

“How did what go?”

“Did you talk about the thing, the picture? I thought that's why you went.”

I said we had, but not really. “I don't know. Maybe I did drop it. I must have.”

“And you're going to see him again.”

I shrugged, like it wasn't something I was in charge of. Even if I did want to hang out with Harper, there was Stroma to think about. I said that to Bee with my hands over Stroma's ears while she wriggled to get free. I said it wasn't so easy making plans with a kid in tow.

Bee raised her eyebrows at me. She said I didn't have to make life so complicated. She said she'd look after Stroma anytime. She said, “Not everyone minds being around little kids.”

I stood there and I thought about my friends who'd rather be dead than seen out with my sister. I thought about the times they'd said couldn't I just leave her somewhere, anywhere, and come out with them. I
thought about the times I'd wished I could. I felt like a bad person.

I said, “Are you always right?”

“Course not,” she told me. “I'm just never wrong.”

When I got Stroma home from Bee's, it was cold and all the lights were off, like there was nobody in. Mum was on the sofa in the dark. I hung up our coats and Stroma's book bag. I rinsed out her lunch box. She sat at the kitchen table drawing while I boiled water for pasta and scraped the moldy fur off the pesto sauce without her noticing. We jumped around when something good came on the radio. Stroma climbed up on the table and put her heart and soul into it. Neither of us mentioned the lack of a parent in the room. Neither of us expected a kiss or a smile or a cup of hot chocolate. Neither of us said this is not what other families do every evening. I guess we were used to it by then.

There were two messages from Dad on the answering machine. That was about all he got out of Mum, her recorded “We're not in right now” voice from months and months ago. It was also the closest he got to parenting during the week because he worked long hours and always forgot to call us when we were actually there. He said things like “Don't forget to brush your teeth, Stroma” and “I hope you're studying, Rowan” and “I hope my two best girls are behaving,” and we
rolled our eyes and kept on with whatever we were doing. It was pathetic, really.

I remember the day Mum and Dad announced they were going to have another baby. That was when they still liked each other. We were having breakfast. I was trying not to think about them having sex.

Jack said, “Please, I'm eating,” and I sniggered through my cornflakes and we got sent upstairs. Clearly they didn't see the funny side of getting pregnant at forty.

Jack said, “Do you think they're replacing us because we're not cute anymore?” He was sitting on the floor, almost twelve, filling the place up with his legs. He was so big suddenly, I thought, God, maybe they are.

When Jack and I were little, Mum and Dad were always doing stuff with us. Mum would be sitting on the sofa waiting when we got home from school. I thought that's what she did all day, sat and waited for us. Dad built spaceships and palaces out of cereal packets and egg boxes. She made me spiral jam sandwiches by rolling the bread into tubes and then slicing them up. He made curries so hot our eyes streamed and water tasted like fire.

We felt like the center of the universe, I guess because we were the center of theirs.

With Stroma they were the same. Everything was always covered in icing or sequins or paint. Dad found
her a bike at the dump and restored it so it looked brand-new. He took her for a ride every evening when he got in, even when he was dead tired, even if it was just around the block. Mum made her a fairy outfit one Christmas and stayed up until two in the morning hand-stitching pink ribbons onto the wings. They created treasure hunts and dance routines and made gingerbread men. They never stopped. Jack and I called them the kids' TV presenters, and laughed at their sweatpants and the paint in their hair. We said they should have more self-respect and act their age. We were just jealous because we weren't the center of things anymore. We were just joking. We were just mean.