Let's Get Lost (10 page)

Dot gave me a tiny nod and pushed her chair into the table so sunlight sliced across her face from the big picture windows, and I could see how all her freckles had joined up over the summer. She had the exact same tremulous look as the time we got caught shoplifting nail varnish from Boots and I tried to pretend that it had been all her idea.

“I guess . . . this is hard for me,” she admitted, resting her chin on her hand. “Like, I don’t know. I thought yeah, you’d be crying all the time and wearing lots of black.”

We both looked down at my ratty blue V-neck jumper and waited for it to materialize into a T-shirt that said, “My mum’s died. Stop me and ask me how.” “I was working on this whole sackcloth and ashes thing but it really chafes.” I grinned, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand. “Can we please talk about something else now?”

Dot smiled gratefully. “Well, Ethan Parker actually acknowledged my existence yesterday and not much else. My mum’s on at me about choosing a university already and you know what she’s like . . .”

She clapped her hand over her mouth; her eyes two perfect circles of horror because I couldn’t possibly know what mothers were like as I didn’t have one.

“Still on your case about going to Cambridge so she can tell everyone that you take after her side of the family?”

“Yeah, yeah!” Dot nodded frantically, her voice far too shrill. “Like, spending three years with a bunch of snotty, posh kids is going to be a rewarding experience. She’s the original Desperate Housewife.”

“Well, at least she hasn’t learned everything she knows about life from a fusty novel written about a hundred and fifty years ago by some emotionally crippled Victorian guy.” Even I was surprised at how venomous I sounded. Dot nodded again so she could show me how big she was with the empathy. And the really annoying thing? It was working.

Dot and I stood up at the same time and before it could even register, she was gathering me up in her little skinny girl arms and trying to hug me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she kept saying.

I knew she was and I knew that she meant it, but I didn’t know what to do with her sorry. I struggled away from her and scurried down the hall to grab her bag.

“Is, I’m here for you any time,” Dot said, getting to the front door before I could and making it evident

that she didn’t have plans to exit in a timely fashion.

“I know,” I said, reaching past her to close my fingers around the door handle. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” She stepped aside and I wrenched open the door and shoved her through it.

“If you tell anyone about this, I swear I’ll make you sorry,” I hissed so vehemently that Dot took a step back and almost collided with the lavender bush.

And finally she stopped being there for me and that wounded, worried look was back in her eyes.

“O-kaay,” she said hesitantly. “So, um, okay. I’ll call you.”

“No, I’ll call you. If I need you.” I let the words hang around for a while so she’d get the message that my likelihood of needing her was highly unlikely. Then I gave her the fakest smile I had in my repertoire.

“Hey, this was great. We really should do it again sometime.”

9

I never cry. Like, ever. I don’t write bad poetry. And I certainly don’t phone up this carefully hand-picked selection of confidantes and whine about what a bad joke my life is. I deal with whatever’s bugging me and messing my shit up by getting down on my hands and knees with a bottle of Flash and a scrubbing brush.

So after I’d got rid of Dot but the gut-gnawing after-effects of her little chat wouldn’t budge, I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. I even did Felix’s bedroom, which had several new species of amoeba festering in the collection of mugs and plates under his bed. My bedroom was already a shiny paean to hygiene, but the lounge and the dining room took me the rest of the afternoon.

The only two places I avoided were their . . .
his
bedroom and the study. Even if we’d been grooving along in perfect father/ daughter harmony (oh, my aching sides!), I’d have avoided all those piles of paper, which apparently are in some kind of order that’s only understandable if you have a degree in astrophysics. And then there are the books. Big books, little books. Crisp new books, static clinging to their pages. Old, yellowing books that smell of dust and damp. Books in his study, books in the box room, books in every room of the house, and when I come across them, I just stack them up neatly and carry on with my one-woman mission to annihilate every speck of dust that gets in my way.

He and Felix had gone out. They’d left me a garbled message on the answerphone about art-supply shops and possibly a trip to the museum, but the washing machine chose that moment to go into its spin cycle, which reverberated around my pounding head, and it wasn’t like they’d have wanted me along, anyway. Two’s company, three’s a crowd and all that.

They came back laden with shopping and plans to rent some DVDs, just as I was tweaking the last cushion into place.

I unplugged the vacuum and looked up to see Dad staring in bemusement at the kitchen, which was now a gleaming advertisement to the benefits of Mr. Muscle.

“You make a mess and I’ll make you wish you were never born,” I told Felix as I relieved him of the bags he was holding. “I’ll put this stuff away before you muck the cupboards up.”

“You cleaned
inside
the cupboards?” Felix giggled, whacking me on the arse as I reached up to the top shelf. “You need to get out more, Is.”

I ignored him and started unpacking tins and bottles, arranging them to my system. Yeah, I had a system.

Not alphabetical because even I haven’t reached that level of anal control freakery, but more by genre.

There was a cough behind me and I realized that he was still there, standing and watching me as I happily shuffled the tinned tomatoes to the side of the spaghetti hoops.

“Isabel, could you stop that for a second, please?”

I nudged the last tin into place, took a deep breath, and turned around with my face a perfect blank.

He gestured with his hand to encapsulate the total spick and spannery of the kitchen. “You’ve done a wonderful job.” He sounded like I’d dragged the admission out of him with a pair of rusty pliers. “Though I recall, your moth— Should I be alarmed by this obsession with tidying?”

“No, I’m not . . .” I protested, and then folded my arms so my hands would stop fluttering about. “I just like things to be neat, orderly.”

“Do you remember the time you were being bullied by that awful creature—what was her name?

Jasmine, Rose, something flowery . . .”

“Daisy? In middle school.” I shuddered at the thought of the ten-stone ten-year-old who’d made me cry every day for six weeks.

“We didn’t even know there was a problem, but you came home every day and insisted on laying the table with a ruler to measure the exact distance between each knife and fork.” He paused and gave me a considered look.

Which I returned with knobs on. No way was I about to go into overshare mode about—well, any of it, really.

“Anyone else would be pleased to have a daughter who’s not a total slob,” I pointed out. “This house would look like the inside of a trash can if I didn’t keep on top of it.”

He nodded his head in acknowledgment of my kick-ass housekeeping skills. “I’ve been talking to Felix about the thorny topic of pocket money, or allowance as I understand it’s to be called. It seems that you received money straight into your bank account in return for certain chores?”

“I got thirty quid a week for cleaning and doing the laundry and picking Felix up after school and—” I narrowed my eyes to see if he’d buy it and then continued— “and a hundred quid a month clothing and sundry allowance.”

“A hundred pounds seems a little excessive,” he murmured, switching on the kettle. “Define sundries.”

“Tampons, sanitary napkins,” I began, and smirked when I saw his pained expression. “Shoe repairs, books for school if there aren’t enough to go around, stuff for my face so I don’t break out . . .”

He nodded his head. Sucker! “That seems reasonable, if you give me your bank details, I’ll set up the direct debit. I haven’t had a chance to do anything more than close the accounts.”

He pressed his hand over his forehead as if he could rub out the frown lines, which seemed to be a permanent fixture—and it was so strange that we could be having this conversation and not mention her by name.

“Cool,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And please don’t keep stealing money from my wallet,” he added softly.

I didn’t bother to deny it. I was too busy concentrating on the chilly feel of the goose bumps rising up on my arms, but I tilted my chin so I could look him in the eye.

“I won’t.”

“Good.” He sighed heavily. “This coldness between us . . . I don’t like it, Isabel, I don’t like it at all.”

“I know.” My voice was this tiny squeak.

And just like that, in a split second, in the blink of an eye, in the time it takes to draw breath and not even have a chance to let it out again, he straightened up and went from soft to hard.

“I promised Felix that I’d spend some time with him this evening watching DVDs and ordering some takeout.” He curled his lip like Felix was going to force him to eat dirt. “If you think you can be pleasant company, you’re welcome to join us.”

I could tell that he thought he was offering me, like, this huge olive branch. Maybe even a whole bloody olive tree. But an evening spent watching
Shrek
(Felix
always
wants to watch
Shrek
) and pretending that I wasn’t gritting my teeth and digging my nails into my palms hard enough to draw blood because it was all bullshit and lies, wasn’t worth a hundred quid a month for clothing and sundries.

“I have stuff to do.”

“Very well.”

I was just settling down for an evening of hardcore skulking in my room, which involved lying like a starfish in the middle of the floor and listening to Smith’s Mope Rock Playlist Number Five when Felix barged in and threw the cordless phone at me.

“For you,” he said. “And we’re ordering Chinese, do you want some?”

“You’re such a little suckass.” I suddenly remembered that we needed to have a conversation about presenting a united front. “But thanks for the whole allowance thing.”

“Hey, it wasn’t my idea to give you money!” Felix protested, put out by the very thought that he might have done me a good turn. “I told Dad that you didn’t deserve any.”

“Whatever, monkey boy. Get me some fortune cookies and a . . . oh, egg rolls and some Kung Pao chicken,” I told him, picking up the phone. “Okay, you can piss off now!”

He slammed the door with great force as I said a cautious hello.

“Isabel. You still have my iPod.”

I closed my eyes and sank back down on the floor. He sounded like the dictionary definition of “I hate your guts.”

“Yeah, I know.” I waited for him to tell me how to get it back to him, but apparently I wasn’t going to get anything from him but a frosty shoulder. “Well, I can’t tonight because I have a thing.”

“Oh yeah, you and your things,” he drawled. “You and your little brother—it was your little brother, wasn’t it?—and some Chinese. Sounds enthralling.”

“How much did you hear?” I demanded, scrolling back to my slanging match with Felix to see if I’d said anything which might indicate that I was a sixteen-year-old compulsive liar.

“Fortune cookies. Egg rolls. Kung Pao chicken. Something about an allowance and that even being a blood relation is little protection against your infamous nastiness. Do you snub him publicly, too?”

I decided to ignore his last dig. “No one asked you to eavesdrop. ”

“I kinda couldn’t help it.” He exhaled heavily. “Look, I need to get my iPod back. I can’t do tonight, anyway, so shall I come around and pick it up tomorrow?”

Come around
where
? “No!” I hissed. “I’ll meet you somewhere. ”

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“You’re not coming around here,” I repeated furiously, already seeing the horrific scene unfolding in front of my eyes.

Dad acting as if Smith was some grubby-pawed potential rapist and then letting slip my real age within, like, ten seconds.

“Isabel, look, the hissy fit is a nice change of pace, but I was just trying to find out if you live near me,” he said with teeth-gritted exasperation, which made me feel like a complete drama queen. “Like, do you live out in Hove or something?”

“I live near Seven Dials. Montpelier Villas,” I admitted somewhat unwillingly. Our nabe was pretty posh.

In fact, we lived on the swankiest street in Brighton. “And you?”

“Kemp Town, George Street, behind Safeway. So do you want to come around here tomorrow afternoon? Just to swap iPods ...”

“Well, why else would I come around?”

He made an impatient “pffffting” sound. “It’s number seventy-three. Come around about two-thirtyish.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said, like I didn’t care one way or another.

“Fine. Maybe you’ll be in a better mood,” he snapped.

“Don’t count on it,” I said, but he’d already hung up and I was talking to dead air.

10

It was a beautiful afternoon. There was still a faint hint of summer in the air, even though it was late September, and I decided to walk along the seafront to Kemp Town, dodging day-trippers and strollers with every step I took. I scowled at every single one of them, but I had my sunglasses on so it was all wasted.

There’s this little stone-walled spit by the pier that I like to stand on and watch the water, but it was knee-deep in fat-faced hordes down from London for the day. Besides, it’s best when there’s rain and wind and the sea comes lashing up at you. I bought a bag of fresh doughnuts from the stall at the pier entrance with the last of the money I stole from Dad and crossed over the road, listening to Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” one last time. I was going to miss Smith’s

iPod—there was some really good stuff on it and I hadn’t worked out how to transfer it on to my computer.

Not like I could ask him to do it because that would really ruin my mean girl rep, I thought as I stood on his doorstep and tried to will my fingers to ring the bell. After a few moments they obliged, and then I had to stand there, quaking in my flip-flops while a pair of feet thundered down the stairs followed by swearing that was so fluent and graphic even I was shocked.