Broken Soup (9 page)

Bee came through the door with Stroma and the smile faded from her face because of the look on mine. Harper got out of the van and picked Stroma up by her armpits and swung her in the air.

“Hi, Bee,” he said. “I'm Harper.” He didn't stop moving for her to say hi back. He gave me his keys and said, “I'll come and get you,” and then they were gone, headed into the park, away from trouble.

There was a moment before it started, a nothing moment, when I knew I was about to ask her and change everything. I took a long time shutting the van door, locking it, putting the keys in my pocket.

“Was it you?” I said.

Bee said, “What?” but I could tell by her face she was stalling.

“Did you drop the negative?”

She didn't speak.

“Why didn't you say something in the shop if it was yours? Or at school?” She stared at me with her sad eyes. She kept her mouth shut. “You could've just said ‘That was mine,'” I said. “I would've given it back. I wouldn't have had to know what it was.”

“Wouldn't you want to have it?” she said in this small, dry voice. “Wouldn't you want to know?”

I looked at her and I tried to forget that I liked her, that I even knew her. “What were you doing with a picture of my brother?” She didn't say anything. “Will you just fucking tell me?” I said.

A lady walked past with too much makeup and a lapdog and she glared at me. I thought, Don't say a word about my language because I will fight you.

I let this long, slow breath out. I asked Bee if the negative was hers, if she had taken the picture.

She said it was. She said she had.

There was this horrible silence and I tried to wait it out, but I couldn't.

“Start talking, Bee, or never talk to me again.”

“I was hiding at the back of the shop, trying to blend in. I was watching you. I'd never seen you out of school before. I was just watching.”

I asked her if she knew Jack.

“I knew him,” she said, closing her eyes.

“How?”

“From around.”

“And you hung out? You were, like, friends?” All she did was nod. “You knew Jack. Did you know he was my brother?”

“I did when I moved to your school. Someone told me.”

“But you didn't say.”

“No.”

“And then you met me and you still didn't say.”

“No.”

“What, you didn't know what to say?”

“Something like that.”

“So you just printed his picture in front of me and said fuck all. That's weird, Bee. That's wrong.”

“I'm sorry. I was scared.”

“Scared?” Bee, who lectured me about fear and said it wasn't OK to go through life avoiding things you were afraid of. Bee, who reckoned she'd like to die flying. I laughed. “Scared of what? Not me.”

“Just scared,” she said.

“Well, it's not OK. It's a shitty thing to do. I still can't believe you did it. Why would you do that to me?” I sounded spoiled. I didn't like how I sounded. But I saw her in her bathroom, tidying up around me while I cried, sitting like stone by the window, saying nothing.

“I did everything wrong,” she said. “I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be friends. I wanted you to find
out. I didn't want him to end up in the bin.”

I thought about the negative, chucked in the bin in Jack's room. I only got it back out because I wanted Bee to like me.

I had this urge to move. I got up and asked her if she wanted anything from the shop, and when she said no, I went in anyway, just to get away. I looked at the stuff on the shelves and the things in the fridges and I didn't want any of them. I watched her through the window and she had her head in her hands, her hair balled up in her fists. I went back outside empty-handed and sat down.

I asked her about the postcard.

She looked at me for a little too long, so I said, “It was in your book. I wasn't snooping. Is it from him?”

She felt around in her bag and got out the book. She gave me the card, picture side up, so I had to turn it over to find out.

Jack's handwriting was on the other. I stared at her for a beat before I read it.

“Oh my God—you and Jack?” I said, and she nodded, her makeup running, a black line down the curve of each cheek. She wiped her face with the flats of her fingers.

I stared at the pavement. I put my forehead down on the damp wood table and looked through the gaps and I tried to think straight. Bee and Jack. Jack and Bee.

When I was born, Jack wanted more than anything else in the world for me to be a boy. We got told so many times about how he went up to the nurse on the ward and demanded she take me back. I hated that story because it left me out.

Same as when Jack and Dad watched football and got that “You're just a girl” look in their eyes. Or the time I found Jack and Tiger Charles trying to make a bonfire in the derelict house on Marsden Street and they wouldn't let me join in.

Jack and Bee put all of those things in the shade. They made me stand on a cliff edge of left-outness. My brother was in love and I didn't know it. I never noticed. He never said.

And then, when he'd gone, she didn't even come
and find me. Instead she put me through this, every step, and watched me squirm.

What was the point of that?

“I can't do this,” I said. “I'm not doing it.”

“Rowan,” Bee said. “Please listen to me.”

I looked over at her. How is it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time?

“You asked me about him,” I said. “You made me tell you stuff. Did you already know it all? Was it a competition?”

Her voice was so quiet compared to mine. “When we printed that picture, I thought we might talk about him. I wanted to tell you, but I got scared. You shut down. You couldn't leave quick enough.”

“Yeah, well, I'd just seen a ghost.”

“I didn't think you'd believe me,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I never met you. I never met any of your family. I was the last thing you needed, a stranger barging in and feeling the same way you did. It's wrong, isn't it?”

“Why didn't he bring you home and introduce you?”

“We were a secret. It was our thing.”

“Did his friends know?”

“Nobody knew.”

“Did you tell Carl?”

“Yes, I told Carl. Jack used to come to the house a lot. Carl knew him too.” Her eyes filled up again then and she looked around her, left and right, like she wanted to run.

“Carl?” I breathed out hard, tried to think straight. I said, “How come Carl let you print the picture in front of me? How come he didn't say anything to me about Jack?”

“He wouldn't interfere. He said it was a mistake, after you'd gone, but he wouldn't have stopped it. Not his way.”

I waited for her to say something else. I just looked at her.

“It's not all about you.”

“Say that again?”

“It's not all about you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You're not the only person who lost Jack. You're not the only one he left behind.”

“You think I don't know that?”

Bee shrugged. There were whole worlds of sadness in her eyes. “I love him too, Rowan. I miss him too.”

I looked over at the park, toward the sun. I could see Harper and Stroma, running in the low corner, circling with their arms out to their sides like airplanes, dodging each other, spinning out. Bee had that strange glow about her that you get from crying, like it's been making you sick to keep it all in. I had no idea how I
felt. If someone had asked me, I wouldn't have understood what they were going on about.

I got up again and she looked at me like “So go if you're going” but I didn't go anywhere. I went to her side of the table and I gave her a hug because I had no idea what to say. She hugged me back and we stayed like that for a while.

A man sat opposite us with his coffee and pretended we weren't there.

A pigeon kept coming too close to my foot.

I thought about the time I almost told Bee how much Jack would have liked her. I pictured him in that kitchen with Carl, taking the stairwells a flight at a time, standing by the front door with the geraniums and daisies.

“Were you together for long?” I said.

“About six months.” Bee smiled and wiped her face again. “Six months three weeks and four days.”

I breathed out through my mouth, puffed out my cheeks.

“He was going to tell you,” she said. “You were the person he most wanted to tell.”

“Talk to me about him,” I said. “Tell me about how you met.”

 

The first time Bee saw my brother, he was walking into Chalk Farm station and she was walking out. The wind
was rushing through the doorway and his shirt was blowing flat against him and out behind. He looked like he was taking off and she laughed and so did he. And they said hello like they knew each other, even though they didn't.

She went home and thought about him. She had this picture of him in her head, walking with the wind in his shirt.

The second time she saw him was in Golders Hill Park. There was a ruined house there and even though she knew it wasn't exactly a secret, being in the middle of London and everything, she was always surprised if other people were there. She was walking toward it and she was annoyed that someone was sitting on the raised floor between the broken pillars, because that was her place. When she saw it was Jack, she went and sat down, like they'd arranged to meet, like he'd been waiting. It couldn't have been easier.

The third time she saw him she said she loved him because she didn't see the point in pretending not to and once you know, you know.

“Your brother had the most beautiful skin,” she said. “I couldn't stop looking at his skin. He was the funniest, sweetest, most give-everything, joy-finding, wisest human being I will ever know.”

We were quiet for a while. My eyes were crying. I wasn't sobbing or anything, no dramatic stuff. Just
water. I looked at the grain of the table. I picked at it with my thumb. It was soft and damp from years of rain.

I said, “You know, it's the best picture of him I ever saw.”

She took it on Hampstead Heath at five in the morning. They were high and they'd just seen a man on a white horse. They were trying to work out if they'd dreamed him or not. “Jack was laughing so hard,” she said. “At something he'd said, at how funny he was.” She shook her head at the thought. She shook her head and stopped smiling and remembered she was sad.

“It was harsh of me to print it like that,” she said. “It was hardcore. I'm never going to feel good about that.”

“Forget it.”

“I wanted it back. I wanted you to know. It just kind of happened. I'm sorry.”

“You're right,” I said. “It would have ended up in the rubbish. I didn't think it was anything. I only did it because I wanted you to like me.”

“You could say the same about me,” she said. “Believe it or not.”

 

When Harper and Stroma came back, Bee got up to go. I asked her what she was doing. I said, “You know I've wanted you two to meet for ages.”

“I'm going to give you some space,” she said.

“You don't have to.”

“I know. But I kind of need some, anyway. We have to talk some more. Will you call me later?”

We hugged and it was awkward, and I told her that I'd been thinking all this time how well she and Jack would get on. Then she walked away with her incriminating bag and her sad face and her hair the same color as mine.

Harper was behind me then. He said, “How was it?”

I did the so-so thing with my hand, the thing Stroma always called Mr. Iffy. And before I could think about it or put it through Customs, I walked into him and put my forehead on his shoulder, my arms around his waist. He had his hand on the back of my head. His sweatshirt was warm. The smell of him was warm.

Stroma went “Aaaah,” but Harper didn't let go so I couldn't turn to get at her.

I said, “She knew him. She loved him.”

He said, “You OK?”

“No idea. She's not. She loved him.”

“Jesus.” His cheek was against my hair. We looked at our reflection in the shop window.

“I wasn't very fair,” I said. “I gave her a really hard time.”

“You didn't fight, though, right?”

“No, we didn't fight. I just made her feel worse than she did already.”

“I think maybe you did that to each other. I think it's not finished yet.”

I phoned Bee while we were still outside the shop and Stroma was finishing her soup and chips for lunch. She didn't pick up. I left a message saying, “Bee, it's me. I'm so sorry. It wasn't sinking in, but it will. I love you.”

Stroma was dead quiet, like she knew something important was going on even if she didn't know what it was. Harper kept giving me these worried glances. I just wanted to be on my own. There was a big old station clock inside the shop and I kept checking the time, like every less-than-a-minute, even though I knew what it was going to say.

That afternoon Dad was supposed to be taking Stroma to Clown Town, one of those sweaty indoor playgrounds where you have to take your shoes off and everyone throws colored Ping-Pong balls at each other. The whole place smells like onions and feet. Stroma didn't want to go. She wanted me to phone him and try and get her out of it, but I wouldn't.

I snapped at her and she went all sulky. Harper did this thing with his hands that meant “Don't take it out on the kid” and I wanted to scream. I really did.