The Taming of Lilah May (15 page)

There's Ben, his lead singer, all spiky black hair and screwed-up face, howling some song into the microphone.

There's Eddie, their drummer, head down, blonde shaggy hair over his face and the sweat shining on his bare chest.

There's Matt, the keyboard player, standing with his legs apart in a typical rock-star pose, his long fair hair limp and parted in the centre. He's the one who sent me the Facebook message.

And there's Jay. My brother. Lead guitar. Not posing, or grimacing. He's wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and his dark hair wasn't so straight then, so there's a wing of curls dipping over one eye. He's looking down at his fingers on the fretboard of his guitar as if he's really concentrating on the music, and he's holding the neck of the guitar with care, like you'd hold an egg in your hand.

It was all about the music for Jay.

That guitar sits alone in the corner of his bedroom now.

I pick it up and run my hands over the strings, stroke the smooth polished surface and feel my way past the little switches and knobs on the front.

‘Can I?' says Bindi.

I shrug.

‘Why not?' I say. ‘He wouldn't mind.'

I pass the heavy instrument over to Bindi
and she strikes what she thinks is a Rock God pose with it. She looks so ridiculous in her pink jewelled clothes and nose-stud, holding a red Les Paul guitar, that I find myself laughing until my stomach hurts. Then she starts to laugh as well, and we're both laughing so loud that for a moment we don't hear the phone with its shrill, insistent tone cutting into the dark hallway outside, but then Benjie starts to bark and our smiles fade, and we leave the guitar on the bed and bolt downstairs.

I snatch up the receiver and can't speak for a moment, I'm so out of breath.

Bindi hovers behind me with one light hand on my shoulder.

‘Lilah?' says Dad's voice. He sounds heavy, broken. I can hear Mum crying in the background.

‘It's not him,' he says. ‘Lilah. It's OK. It's not Jay.'

I drop the phone and fall to my knees.

Bindi speaks to my dad and then hangs up.

She puts her arms around me.

We sit in the dark hall on the carpet.

I'm shaking so hard that I head-butt her in the teeth at one point.

‘It doesn't matter,' she says, when I apologise.

She's right.

Nothing else matters.

I'm so relieved. We've been lucky. It's not Jay who's been found dead. This time.

Not sure how much more I can handle. I was getting better because of Benjie, but I'm still angry with Jay for putting us through all this. I miss him. I miss him more than ever. I just want to know that he's OK.

And despite what Bindi says, I'm angry with Mum and Dad for never being there when Jay needed them. Or when I needed them. I'm angry that Jay's mates deserted him and he felt the need to try drugs and then run away from home. Most of all, I'm angry with one person for what she did and the mess she made of all this.

And that one person is me.

In the few days after we find out that it wasn't Jay who was found in the river, we tiptoe around the house in a kind of numb shock.

None of us can say his name, but from time to time we give each other a wan smile of relief mixed up with anguish, because we're still no nearer to finding him. We still don't know whether he's dead or alive.

Adam rings up to see how I am, but I can hardly speak.

‘
Groo,
' I manage.

It seems a good time to use a Lilah-ism. I can't find any normal words that even get close to painting how I feel inside.

‘OK,' says Adam. ‘Well, I'm glad it wasn't Jay. That means you can kind of have hope again, yeah?'

I can't answer. My head is so muddled up that I don't know what I want any more.

Dad takes a day off work, which is dead unusual.

‘Somebody else can look after the lions,' he says. ‘We need some family time.'

He's probably right. But the thought of having
to spend an entire day with the Old Dudes is stressing me out a bit.

‘You can take a day off school, Lilah,' says Mum. ‘Just this once.'

My heart sinks into my biker boots.

The one good thing about school is that it keeps me getting up in the mornings. That, Planet Rock and Bindi, with her shy smile and her gentle voice. She's texted me about a million times since she spent the evening here.

Reeta dropped by with a huge dish of homemade Indian food the next night.

When Mum opened the door and took the hot dish full of fragrant, spicy smells, both women burst into tears and there was lots of hugging.

‘Thank God,' whispered Reeta. ‘Thank God it wasn't your boy, Rachel.'

So I reckon that I'm going to have to do Family Day, seeing as I'm part of this family and we haven't exactly been having the best time lately.

‘Where shall we go?' asks Dad. ‘Park? It's a nice day out there.'

So we end up in the park, just the three of us, strolling along past the lake and the Chinese Pagoda and the wooden hut where they serve teas, and to
anybody sitting on a bench and watching us pass by, we probably look just like a normal family having a lovely day out together.

Except that the May family is anything but normal.

Dad buys us ice creams from the hut and we do a lap of the park, going towards the swings where I messed about with Adam Carter. Even though that was only a few weeks ago, it feels like about a hundred years.

We don't talk much. I make a great play out of swiping the top of the ice cream off with my tongue.

I see Mum cast a look towards the swings out of the corner of her eye, and then she catches Dad's, and he puts his arm around her shoulders.

I stare at the empty orange plastic seats tipping slightly in the breeze, and I see myself aged about six sitting on one of them and gripping the greasy chains tight in my hot hands. Jay's behind me, with his big mop of hair lifting in the breeze. He's wearing a striped blue and white T-shirt and brown shorts and he's pushing me up into the air with a shout of effort, and I'm screaming with happiness and feeling the hot sun on my cheeks and the
whoosh
of the air as I sink down and fly up again, and my stomach's doing that
sinking thing like I'm on a roller coaster. Somewhere in the background Mum and Dad are two little dots sitting on a bench with bags of sandwiches and a rolled-up rug ready for a picnic.

I watch my parents now trying not to look at the swings, and that flicker of anger starts to burn up my insides again. Except this time it doesn't stop, but boils up into this great big, tense, tight feeling. I just know it's going to all burst out of my mouth and I can't stop it, so I open my mouth and let it out, and even I am frightened by the yelling, but my gob's taken on a mind of its own and I can't do anything about it.

‘I'm SICK of hiding my feelings because of Jay!' I yell.

Mum and Dad both jump at the tone of my voice and the unexpected explosion.

Dad takes a step towards me, but no amount of taming is going to stop this one.

‘I'm sick of not being able to talk about Jay without you getting in a state or having a go at me or getting all upset!' I scream.

A flock of pigeons that were pecking at a half-eaten sandwich on the tarmac rise up in a big panicky flight of flapping wings.

‘And I'm angry that Jay felt lonely all the time!'
I continue. ‘And I'm fed up not being myself in case I upset anybody. OK? OK?'

I take my denim jacket off and chuck it on the grass. Then I head off to the swing and sit down on the orange plastic seat. The sharp plastic sides cut into my bottom.

Mum puts one hand over her mouth and stops dead in her tracks.

‘It's OK,' says Dad. ‘It's probably a good idea. She needs to let her feelings out.'

He comes over to where I'm sitting and stands behind me. I feel his big, lion-taming hands on my waist and then there's a gentle push. I just about get my feet off the ground, and then come skittering down again with my feet trailing in the gravel underneath.

‘Pathetic,' I say. ‘I'm fifteen, not six. You'll have to push a bit harder than that.'

‘Aren't you breaking the park rules?' says Mum. ‘You're a bit old for swings now, aren't you Lilah?'

Dad and I give her a scathing look of impatience.

‘Purleease,' I say. ‘What are you, some sort of
ruletarian
?'

She laughs and wipes her eyes with a handkerchief.

‘Oh Lilah,' she says. ‘Fair enough.'

Then Mum looks around the park like a naughty child caught bunking off school. She sits down on the swing next to me and grabs the chains and closes her eyes tight while Dad gives her an enormous push into the air, and before we know it, he's darting between us both and we're flying up into the air with our legs sticking out in front of us, Mum in her sensible knee-length blue skirt and flat shoes, and me all black-jeaned and booted. We scream out like we're kids, and for just a moment while I'm up there, I close my eyes in the warmth of the sun and imagine it's Jay below on the ground, staring up at me and waiting for me to come back down so that he can give me another push, and the feeling is so sweet that I smile a pure smile of happiness.

But then it's sucked away again almost as soon as it comes, and the chill of what's real hits me in the stomach like a bag of rusty nails. I come down, snatch my black denim jacket up from the grass, dig my hands deep into the pockets and head off across the park without a word. Mum and Dad have the sense to just let me go, and when I get to the park gates and glance back, they're standing together by the swings, two tiny, dark stick-figures, and I can tell that Mum is crying again from the way
that Dad is bending over her.

I still haven't cried since the day Jay left, over two years ago.

The tears just won't come.