The Taming of Lilah May (7 page)

I make an excuse and leave the table to write what I can't say in my diary. I don't want to upset Mum.

Not today.

I should have done the wrong thing instead. If I'd done the wrong thing, then maybe, just maybe . . . Jay might still be here.

It's a hot summer's evening in July a few years ago. I'm lying face down on top of a canal boat with my hands propping up my chin and the toes of my plimsolls drumming on the hot metal roof.

Jay's lying next to me on his stomach too. He's just turned fifteen and discovered his passion for rock music. He's wearing tiny earphones and nodding his head up and down to the beat.

I've got a book but I'm bored with it.

Mum and Dad have gone off to one of their millions of canal-side pubs for the evening and left us a picnic and a bottle of lager shandy each as a treat, but Jay's just produced a bottle of cider from some hidden part of his luggage. So we're taking turns
swigging from the bottle, and the cider is giving me a pleasant muzzy sort of feeling in my head, until the sky seems bluer and more vivid and the air brushing over my cheeks smells gorgeous – newly-cut grass and warm, swampy canal water mixed with the distant smell of scampi and chips from the pub.

I pull at his earphones.

‘Hey, Liles, cut it out,' he says, but he's giving me his lazy grin from underneath his dark mop of hair.

When Mum and Dad go out, it's as if we enter our own little world. They go out a lot because of their weird jobs that take them out at strange times of the day and night, so often it's just Jay and me. Sometimes we don't speak, we do our own thing, but it's kind of a safe feeling knowing he's there next to me.

Tonight I want to chat, though.

I pull harder at his earphones, until he takes them out himself with a resigned sigh and flips over onto his back, staring up at the clouds.

‘I'm knackered,' he says. ‘All those bloody locks. Why can't the Old Dudes pick a canal without any?'

‘I don't think there are many without locks,' I say. ‘We could suggest a river next time.'

Mum and Dad have us leaping onto the banks
of the canal all day, running towards locks with big keys and pumping like fury at the gates until the water goes up or down and we can cruise into the lock for the long boring wait to get out the other side. By which time, we've had to leap off the boat yet again to swing open the heavy gates and let the boat through.

There's usually some sort of crisis.

This morning, I held the boat too tight in the lock and forgot to unwind the rope when the water drained down, so that the entire boat was suspended in mid-air like some weird, water-skimming aeroplane, and then when I let go of the rope in a panic, the boat smacked down onto the water and all the china in the kitchen slithered off the shelves and smashed on the floor.

The day before, a cow put its front legs on the boat and then got in a right state when it couldn't get them off again.

The day before that, we woke up to find that the boat had come loose from its moorings in the night and we'd drifted about a mile upstream and into the path of several oncoming boats.

But it's kind of fun. Mum screams and Dad tries to calm her down and we leap on and off the
boat like demented frogs and eat a lot of chicken sandwiches and all in all, it's just being a normal mad happy family.

Except that we don't usually get this much attention from Mum and Dad.

Most of the time we're left to amuse ourselves.

It takes a holiday on a boat to kind of weld us together again.

Jay's flipped back over onto his front now and is observing me over the top of his shades.

‘You're growing up, Liles,' he says.

I flush.

I'm still only twelve and haven't started wearing make-up and piercings yet. My hair's scraped back into a ponytail and my skin's all fresh and freckled and young-looking.

But I've had to go shopping for a first bra which is kind of embarrassing, and I don't really want to talk about my sore chest with Jay, so I look up at the bridge and point at a couple who are there snogging, oblivious to the world.

‘Do you do that?' I say.

Jay glances up at the bridge and laughs, but doesn't answer.

Sometimes I think that there's a secret, dark
place growing bigger in my brother, where a load of things go on that little sisters don't understand. Yeah, sure, he tells me things that he doesn't tell Mum and Dad, but sometimes he seems vague and shy.

‘Yuk,' I say. ‘I am never going to kiss a boy EVER.'

Jay gives me a sideways look.

‘You'll have them queuing up for you in a few years, Liles,' he says.

I make a face, and then whack him over the head with a cushion until he surrenders and goes down into the cabin to get our picnic.

The next day I have this weird, out-of-body-type experience.

We've been cruising down the canal all day, and now we've moored up and decided to eat inside tonight as there's a cold wind.

Mum's laid the tiny table that gets folded away at night to make way for our beds.

There's loads of good food – cold hard-boiled eggs, green salad, fresh, soft white rolls and a home-made chicken and ham pie from a shop we found earlier in the day.

Jay's already picking at a bowl of crisps, even
though Mum's trying to slap his hands away from it.

‘Why do teenage boys get so hungry?' she says, but she's smiling.

We eat all the food, and then Dad draws the dark-red curtains in the tiny windows and puts on the lamps, and we sit round the table and play a very long and argumentative game of Scrabble. Jay's laughing his head off at Mum's pathetic attempts to come up with words that nobody's ever heard of, and it's as if one minute I'm there, part of it all, and the next I've floated up towards the low ceiling and I'm looking down at the four of us sitting below. I can see the parting in Mum's hair and the remnants of powdery grey dry shampoo on Dad's, the dark curls that smother Jay's head and the smoother, shinier hair on top of my own.

It's such a clear vision of a family. A happy family unit.

Unbreakable. Or so I thought

‘I'm going to remember this,' I say, somewhere inside my head. ‘Some day when I'm not so happy.'

I thought then that maybe I'd be a grey old lady when I remembered the scene on the boat.

How wrong can you be?

Sometimes I wish I'd been born a boy. Jay got away with just about everything when he was fifteen and still lived at home. He came in when he wanted, stayed out late, drank beer up in his bedroom, had his mates round for parties when Mum and Dad went away, rolled out of bed in the morning and straight into jeans and T-shirt before heading out at the weekend to chill with his band.

I'm not allowed to do any of that. I'm fifteen now, but the way Mum and Dad go on at me, you'd think I was about twelve. I'm not allowed to go out after dinner unless Mum has phoned the parents of whichever friend I'm visiting
and checked that I'm not lying. I'm not allowed to have anybody over for sleepovers because Mum says her nerves are too fragile, and she can't cope with being deprived of her beauty sleep by our late-night chattering if she's got to pull bunnies out of hats for a children's party the next day.

I'm expected to do all my own washing too. Bindi thinks that is hilarious. Reeta does all the family's washing, and cooks, cleans and runs about after them, and still seems pretty happy. My mum goes on and on about how she spends too much time in the kitchen. ‘I wasn't actually born at the kitchen sink, you know,' she says.

I don't answer. I'd only be rude, and I'm fed up of being angry and rude all the time, but the thing is, I can't seem to stop it. How do you stop being angry deep inside? I reckon I'll never stop.

Not until Jay comes home again
.

It's after the boat holiday that Jay starts to change.

It's only little things at first.

I don't even really take much notice of them.

He's a bit more distant, like he's thinking about something he loved and lost. If I say something to him, it takes him a moment to focus on me before he can give me an answer. The old Jay was really quick and snappy and would throw a clever reply straight back.

He starts wearing more black and throws out all his old blue and white rugby shirts and khaki shorts that he used to wear when he was younger.

He stops taking showers.

He spends more and more time up in his bedroom, instead of chatting and strumming his guitar downstairs at the kitchen table like he used to, leaning back on the wooden chair, his curls dropping over his sharp, clever face and his foot tapping up and down on the kitchen lino.

‘I never thought I'd say this,' says Mum, ‘but I quite miss Jay playing his guitar in the kitchen.'

We laugh about it because it's all just normal adolescent stuff, we reckon.

He's a teenage boy, after all, and loads of girls at my school have brothers who are way weirder than Jay. Bindi's cousin is sixteen and obsessed with fish. He wants to be a marine biologist when he leaves school. Her aunt doesn't much care. Her main priority is to get him married off to a nice Indian girl so that she can have some grandchildren to spoil and cook for.