When I think of people like Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe, it seems the most famous thing they ever did was die young. They stopped being real people who took drugs or told lies or went to the loo or whatever. They became saints and geniuses overnight. They became whoever anybody wanted them to be.
It was the same with Jack. He was a saint. We were just the living.
I pictured Mum lying in her room, all absence and silence and skin and bone. This boy she was grieving for, this perfect boy who made her life worth living, who made her forget she had other kids to love – who was he exactly? She loved him and everything, obviously, but I don’t recall her worshipping him like that when he was alive. I remember her calling him a little shit and grounding him for borrowing out of her purse. I remember her yelling at him to get up in the morning and stop peeing in the houseplants.
Even Jack would look bad if you compared him to his dead self. It was as if by losing him, she got him back, the son she wanted, the one she imagined having, before Jack was born and his personality got in the way.
Looking at that picture I realised there was something about it that was different to all the other ones plastering the house. His hair didn’t look combed or over-shiny. It looked thick and dark and messy, like every day. His skin looked like you could reach out and touch it. It was so detailed, the chicken pox scar on his brow bone, the flush on his cheeks, the way a smile could change his face completely if he meant it. There was a brightness about him. He was happy, not acting that way in front of a cheesy backdrop.
It was off duty. It was real. It was the person I was missing.
It was the Jackest picture of Jack I’d ever seen.
There’s no need to go through all the ways I tried to make sense of my own brother’s face showing up like that. None of them worked anyway. A stranger had given me something I’d never seen before that turned out to be mine. How was I supposed to feel? How could it be mine if I’d never seen it?
If I had no idea something existed, how could I manage to drop it? I checked the lining of my coat, the insides of my bag, the pockets of everything, and I didn’t find anything else I’d never seen before.
And this boy who gave it to me. I tried to remember what he looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes, I had a few details, but I couldn’t see him clearly. I wasn’t even sure I’d recognise him again. Did he know what he was doing or was it a coincidence? Which of those was worse?
I’m not a fan of coincidence and fate and all that. It makes me feel like there’s no point doing anything if you can’t change things, if you can’t be even a tiny bit in charge. Plus I realised that if there was coincidence, there was also anti-coincidence, the thing that only just never happens by the skin of its teeth, and because you’re not expecting it, you have no idea that it almost did.
Everywhere I went, I pictured him just leaving, disappearing round a corner or about to arrive, but only when I’d gone. It wasn’t a good feeling. It tied me up like a ball of string in a cartoon.
I didn’t show anyone else in my family the picture, not Mum or Dad or Stroma. I kept it to myself, hid it in the dark far corner underneath my bed where I could reach for it at night and where nobody else ever bothered to go. It had found me so it was mine. That’s what I figured.
Every so often, Mum had to go to the doctor to prove she was taking her medicine and not selling it on the black market. She must have cost the NHS a pile of money with all the pills she was on so they probably needed to make sure she was worth it. I swear she had the wrong prescription because the only thing different about Mum since she’d started taking it was that she’d got thinner. The bones in her hands and face were clearer than they used to be, like the ground coming back under melting snow.
I had a list of questions for the doctors, like whether they knew Mum was bereaved and not overweight, and if she ever actually said a word to them because she was pretty much silent at home. I wanted to ask them what happened next, but they couldn’t talk to me because I was a minor and it was all a big secret.
They didn’t know that I came with Mum every time because without me she wouldn’t even get there. It flew under their radar that I was the one making sure she arrived in one piece and behaved herself, not the other way round.
The waiting room was jammed with bored kids and posters about sexually transmitted diseases. There were polite notices everywhere that said if you punched any of the receptionists you were in big trouble. Mum was sitting next to me with her eyes closed and her nose and mouth buried in a scarf. It wasn’t even cold. Stroma was doing her best to play with three bits of Lego and a coverless book.
When they called Mum’s name over the loudspeakers, she ignored it. I watched her trying to disappear inside her own clothes.
Stroma said, “Mummy, that’s you,” and started pulling at her. The receptionists were watching.
The doctor’s voice came on again: “Jane Clark to Room 5.”
Stroma managed to pull Mum’s sleeve right over her hand, so her arm stayed somewhere inside her coat, lolling against her body, inert like the rest of her, hiding.
“Come on, Mum,” I said, pulling her towards her feet by her other hand. “You have to get up and see the doctor.”
We looked ridiculous, we must have done. Two kids trying to force a grown woman to move. In the end, somebody muttered into a phone and a doctor came down to take Mum upstairs.
“It’s not working,” I said to him. “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working!” And my voice got louder and angrier in the hush of the room. I sat back down and waited for people to stop staring. Stroma climbed on to my lap and put one arm round my neck. Part of me wanted to push her off and walk out. The other part kissed the top of her head and looked around.
And that’s when I saw him, the boy. He was sitting on a bench opposite and to my left, in the corner, and he was watching us.
Stroma must have felt me tense every muscle because she looked up at me and said, “What?”
I shook my head and said, “Nothing,” but I didn’t take my eyes from him because I couldn’t. He was wearing a black top with the hood up. He didn’t move when I saw him. He didn’t flinch or even blink. He didn’t look surprised. He smiled and I remembered the chip in his tooth. My face felt tight and clumsy, like someone else’s, so I didn’t smile back. I just rested my chin on Stroma’s head and carried on looking.
I knew I had to ask him about Jack’s picture. I knew this was my chance. I was working out what to say when the woman at the desk called out, “Harper Greene? Harper Greene? Can you fill in this form, please?” And the boy stood up.
At the same time, Mum came out, empty-faced, eyes dead ahead, and Stroma jumped off my lap. They headed for the door. I couldn’t let either of them cross the road without me.
“It’s just your address,” the woman with the clipboard was saying to the boy. “You haven’t put one down.”
He had an accent, American maybe. I hadn’t remembered that. “Market Road,” he said. “Number 71.”
And he looked straight at me when he said it.
Market Road is not the sort of road you stroll down lightly if you’re a girl. I said that to Bee as soon as she started her go-and-meet-this-Harper-Greene campaign on me. I reminded her that most of the girls walking down there were working pretty hard to pay off their drug debts.
She said, “Don’t walk then. Go on your bike if it makes you feel better.”
We were sitting under a tree in Regent’s Park, watching Sonny and Stroma fill a bin bag with conkers. Stroma liked being the oldest for once. She was ordering Sonny about like her life depended on it, doing quality control on