The Glass House (15 page)

Even if it was only a little, I understood.

B
EFORE
WE
went back to the flat, we stopped at The Happy Mart to buy ingredients to make Irish stew with dumplings. I thought the recipe sounded like hearty winter food, so wrong in this hot weather, but since I wasn’t allowed to make pizza, it was the most edible of the suggestions we’d come up with. Spicy food was a definite no-no for me—my digestive system would rebel—and unfortunately that seemed to be the only other sort of food Thomas knew how to cook. Not that he knew how to cook stew, but his gran had given him
her
gran’s recipe. So this was a compromise.

“You promise me you’ll try it,” Thomas said as he stopped at the counter to pay for the ingredients.

We unloaded the trolley, a way too healthy collection of onions, carrots, potatoes, and celery. We had more vegetables on that conveyor belt than I think I’d eaten in my entire life. Unless you could count potatoes. But I’d been told you couldn’t. Potatoes were a vegetable. I had no idea why they couldn’t be included in the five fruits and vegetables you were supposed to eat a day. It was crazy.

Once it was empty, I pushed the trolley over to where it belonged. When I turned back, Thomas was watching me.
Really
watching me. It was the sort of look that was going to get him in trouble anywhere but complete privacy. My breath caught in my throat. This was the way he’d looked at me yesterday before he’d pulled me down on top of him and kissed me on his bed—his breathing deep, his eyes full of wonder—and I’d melted against him and let go just a little more. Every time a little more.

I don’t think he meant to look at me like that right then—it just happened. But we were no longer in The Happy Mart. The Happy Mart didn’t fucking exist.

All I could think was that if Corinne was out when we got upstairs, we could kiss again, in my bed this time. We had about a hundred fantasies to try out. Some adventurous, some not. Some needy and desperate, some all about the ache, all about the slow.

“There’s supposed to be a connection between food and sex, you know,” Thomas said softly as I stepped close. His words were warm as his breath in my ear. We were paying no attention whatsoever to the cashier ringing up our food. I liked that he’d gotten completely locked in this moment with me.

God, I had to lessen the tension somehow.

“Stew and sex? I’m not feeling it,” I said. “Maybe the dumplings, though. I could definitely have a thing for dumplings.” I had no fucking idea what a dumpling was, but I was just going with it.

The cashier gave us a funny look as she took the cash Thomas held out to her. She might have been one of Corinne’s friends. Perhaps she’d laugh about this later, at the two of us staring at one another and talking about sex and dumplings.

Thomas snorted and passed me a bag to carry. I made him give me the heaviest one, which he did, grudgingly. And we left to walk slow and close across the car park and down the street to my block.

I let Thomas set the pace.

I knew I was always going to have to struggle with the protective urge that swamped me whenever he took what seemed like too deep a breath. He had to take it easy for a while, and he was going to be taking steroids for a few weeks to bring back some of his lung capacity that had been destroyed after the attack. But the doctors had said he was okay to do stairs and to build up to walks of about a mile if he took it easy. We took it very easy.

Thomas’s biggest worry was steroids made you put on weight, so I’d agreed to walk with him every day, even if it was just a circuit of the estate. And I tried to reassure him, even if it was only through my touch, my fingers on his skin, that I thought him beautiful anyway, always.

We took the stairs like we had all the time in the world. It would take about ten minutes for us to get to my floor. Thomas, like me, wasn’t a big fan of the lift.

Near the top of the last flight, I put the bag of shopping down and stopped.

Thomas stopped too.

No one ever came up here. I wasn’t even sure there was anyone else on our floor. I leaned against the crumbling paintwork and pulled at the bottom of Thomas’s loose T-shirt, drawing him closer to me.

“I like this,” I whispered.

“What?” he whispered back, leaning down slightly to put the shopping on the floor between his legs.

“
This
,” I murmured, entwining our fingers. “I think I’m happy…. Is that weird?”

Thomas shook his head and smiled. I bumped our noses together.

“Can we go somewhere a bit more private?” he whispered. “I want to kiss you. I don’t care if your sister’s home. We can be quiet.”

Quicker than lightning I crushed my mouth against his before picking up both bags of shopping and pulling him after me up the stairs.

H
ALF
PAST
seven Monday morning, exactly ten days before exams started, I knelt down on the floor and peered under my bed. The glass glittered in the brief morning blaze of sunlight that filled my room. Most of this glass had come from the broken bottles that littered the streets after the weekend. It wasn’t colorful or special—it was mostly useless to me unless I was to make anything without the color I normally used. I knew I should get rid of it. I could see it was perhaps a little weird keeping it here. It only served to remind me of the loneliness I’d felt all those months—
years
—before Thomas, when I’d collected glass, trying to fill an emptiness I still couldn’t fathom.

I stood up and went into the kitchen. Corinne had already left for work, so she wouldn’t ask any awkward questions about what on earth I was doing or why on earth I had all the broken glass hidden there in the first place. I’d just returned to my room with a pair of rubber gloves to protect my hands and a couple of Happy Mart plastic bags to put the glass in when there was a knock at the door.

It wasn’t so unusual for there to be a knock at the door anymore, but at the same time, I didn’t think it would be Thomas. I was meeting him at school. The timetable was killing me, but so far I’d only missed one lesson, and that hadn’t been because I’d wanted to—I’d just forgotten.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check if there was a change of plan. No text or missed call.

I waited a heartbeat to see if anyone called out. Thomas almost always called out. Nothing.

Another knock, impatient this one.

Feeling a little queasy, I stepped into the hall and said, “Who is it?”

I wished my voice sounded stronger, deeper, or at least about a thousand times more confident.

No one replied.

Now I regretted not remaining quiet and pretending no one was in. But these past few weeks, I’d been trying desperately to stop keeping the world at arm’s length. I’d been trying to face things. And this was a small thing, right? Someone at the door. I trailed my fingers down the raised geometric wallpaper in the hallway and, biting my lip, I cautiously unlatched the door.

The person standing in front of me was perhaps the very last person I expected to see.

Mum, puffing convulsively on a cigarette in the doorway.

I stared at her in shock. After a few seconds, I realized my mouth was hanging open, and I shut it so hard my teeth clacked together with an audible snap.

Smoke warped the air between us as she exhaled lengthily. The smell of the smoke brought everything rushing back—I was there again, in Brighton, so fucking unhappy that I’d thought about just
stopping
everything more than once.

My heart lurched.

She flashed me a brittle smile.

God, she looked different—her face was lined and deeply tanned, her hair shorter and browner, with auburn highlights. Corinne’s was a similar shade, so I figured it must be her natural color.

“You got no welcome for your long-lost mum, then?” she said in the voice she reserved for when she was being sickly, fakely sweet.

Until she spoke I actually thought I might have been hallucinating.

A welcome?
No, I hadn’t. I was still processing the fact she was standing there in front of me. It had been ten months since she’d just taken off. Ten fucking months and not even a phone call, a postcard to let me know where she was, nothing to even check I was okay.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked.

She took another long drag of her cigarette, and I noticed the remains of two more at her feet. She always had been an awful chain-smoker—nerves, she called it. But perhaps this brightness was just a front. Perhaps she’d needed some courage to knock on this door—perhaps she knew what she’d done was fucked up. Still I couldn’t meet her eyes. Instead I looked past her to the dingy corridor outside. A large black suitcase filled the space behind her.

For a heartbeat everything dimmed. I didn’t even realize I’d swayed until my shoulder hit the doorjamb. My stomach was churning.

She hadn’t just popped over for a visit, then.

“You always were a moody sod, Sasha. Move out the way, I haven’t got all day.”

This tone was tired and weary. And it was the one I was more familiar with.

I wanted to shake my head, but I couldn’t. My body had frozen. My feet were paralyzed to the spot. I met her eyes at last; they were so dark they could be black. She looked older. The sun had shriveled her, sucked out her vitality, and aged her ten years.

I was taller—surprisingly—so she seemed small, throwing whatever balance might have been left between us.

I wondered if she’d been to the flat in Brighton first, if she thought I’d somehow still be there. I wondered how she’d thought I’d survived living on fresh. Fucking. Air.

God, I needed some fresh fucking air right now. I needed to figure out how the fuck I could deal with her just turning up like this after everything without an apology or a
How have you been?
Acting like I should be pleased to see her, like
nothing
had fucking happened at all. Because I wasn’t dealing right now, no fucking way. My chest was being squeezed in a glass vise, and I didn’t know if it was my anger or hurt that felt worse, but it felt fucking awful.

My schoolbag with everything I needed for the day was splayed out across my bed, but I couldn’t go back for it. I flung the door open wide. My hip caught the edge of her coffin-sized suitcase as I made for the stairwell. I thought I heard it crash to the ground, and I hoped something was broken. I hoped a lot of things were broken. But I didn’t look back to check.

T
HE
STREETS
were rainwashed, sunlight glittering brightly off every solid surface, as if the world were fractured and on the verge of splitting apart.

At the corner of the block, I leaned back against a lamppost and ran my hands through my hair, trying to calm down. My head was banging, my heart thumping in my chest. I had to go and tell Corinne, but I wasn’t sure I could face dealing with this right now. I needed to get my head around it somehow.

I didn’t know what to do or how to feel. I didn’t want to admit it, but some tiny, pathetic part of me was so happy Mum was here, that she was okay. But the rest of me was so angry, I felt betrayed by the part of myself that felt happy.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Where are you?

Thomas. I was supposed to meet him at eight.

I closed my eyes, blinking back stupid hot tears. I wanted Thomas to be right here with me so badly. I wanted his arms around me, his presence uncurling the fist in my chest like it always did, calming me, making me feel like everything was going to be all right. Making me feel as though I had some control, even when I knew I didn’t. But exams started next week, and he wanted to do well. He didn’t need this. He needed to be at school. I put the damn phone back in my pocket, but then I pulled it right back out again.

Thomas would worry if I just ignored him.

I’ll be in later
, I replied.

Why? What’s happened? Call me?
he replied two seconds later, and I imagined him staring at his phone, waiting for me to reply.

Can’t. I’ll tell you later….

God, I didn’t mean to be so cold, but I couldn’t talk to him about this right now—I didn’t want to fall apart on the phone in the middle of the street. I turned the volume off so I wouldn’t hear it if he texted again and set off toward The Happy Mart.

C
ORINNE
WAS
in the bakery aisle doing a stock check.

“Did you know?”

She jumped at my words and clutched her throat.

“Jesus, Sasha! What are you doing creeping up behind me? Shouldn’t you have left for school?”

“Did you know she was coming back?”

“What are you going on about?”

Corinne put the stock check scanner on the shelf of loaves behind her and reached out a hand to stroke down my arm.

“What is it?” she said again when my words refused to come and I stood there staring at the stacks upon stacks of bread rolls.

“Mum,” I spat out at last. “She’s at the flat.”

“Seriously?”

I don’t think Corinne was questioning the truth of what I’d said. She looked as shocked as I felt, her already pale complexion completely drained of color.

“What did she say? Did you let her in?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw in an effort not to lose it.

“She’s in the flat…. I can’t… deal with her,” I said, and shaking my head, I turned and ran.

I
T
WAS
raining lightly when I reached the school. I had no idea why I’d gone there. School was one of the last places I thought I’d want to be right now. I ended up on the playing field near the spot Thomas had his asthma attack. No one would be out here in the rain doing PE today. I sank down gracelessly onto the wet grass. I kept telling myself what I felt now wasn’t as bad as when I thought I’d lost him—nothing was as bad as that, nothing could ever be as bad as that. Just thinking about it made me panicky, and I had to keep reminding myself Thomas was okay. He was over in the school building somewhere, revising. I wished I were with him. Not at school necessarily, just with him.