All my friends were cracking up behind me. The girl at the counter was trying to give me my change and everybody in the queue was just staring. I couldn’t think why he was doing this to me. I wondered if embarrassing strangers was one of the ways he got through his day. Maybe he walked around with a pile of random stuff in his pockets – not just negatives, but thimbles and condoms and glasses and handcuffs. I might be getting off lightly.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I said thank you, who knows for what, and I went red like always, and I pulled a face at my friends like I was in on the joke. Then I shoved the negative in my bag with the oranges and milk and eggs, and he smiled.
All the way home I got, “What is it, Rowan?” and “Let’s see” and “Nice smile” – a flock of seagulls in school uniform, shrieking and pointing and jumping around me. And I did my usual thing of taking something that’s just happened apart in my head, until it’s in little pieces all over the place and I can’t fit it back together again. I wanted to know why he’d picked me out of everyone in the shop, and whether I should be glad about that or not. I thought about what he said (you dropped this … no really … I’m sure) and what I did (act like a rabbit in headlights, argue, give in). I was laughing about it on the outside, feeling like an idiot on the quiet. I had no idea something important might have happened.
My name is Rowan Clark and I’m not the same person as I was in that shop, not any more. The rowan is a tree that’s meant to protect you from bad things. People made crosses out of it to keep away witches in the days before they knew any better. Maybe my mum and dad named me it on purpose, maybe not, but it didn’t do much good. Bad things and my family acted like magnets back then, coming together whatever was in the way.
When I got home with the shopping, I forgot about the negative because there was too much to do. Mum was asleep on the sofa while Stroma watched Fairly Odd Parents with the sound off. Stroma’s my little sister. She was named after an island off Caithness where nobody lives any more. There used to be people there until 1961 and one of them was someone way back in my dad’s family. Then there was just one man in a lighthouse, until they made the lighthouse work without the man and he left too. That’s what Stroma and her namesake have in common, getting gradually abandoned.
I made scrambled eggs on toast with cut up oranges and a glass of milk. While we were eating, I asked her how her day was, and she said it was great because she got Star of the Week for writing five sentences with full stops and everything. Being Star of the Week means you get a badge made from cardboard and a cushion to sit on at story time, which is a big deal, apparently, when you’re nearly six.
I asked her what her five sentences were, and she said they were about what she did at the weekend. I said, “What did we do?” and she reeled them off, counting them on her fingers.
“I went to the zoo. With my mum and dad. We saw tigers. I had popcorn. It was fun.”
Five lies, but I let it slide, and after a minute she met my eye and started talking about something else I couldn’t quite make out because her mouth was full of orange. Stroma and I had whole conversations with our mouths full. It was one of the benefits of parentless meals. That and eating with your fingers and having your pudding first if you felt like it.
After supper she did a drawing of a torture chamber while I washed up.
“It’s us going swimming,” she said, pointing at the rivers of blood and the people hanging from walls.
I said, “We can go on Saturday if you want,” which she did and I already knew it.
She asked me to draw a unicorn, and even though it looked more like a rhinoceros and should have gone in the bin, she coloured it pink out of loyalty and called it Sparkle.
When she was all clean and in her pyjamas, we’d read a book and she was feeling sleepy, Stroma asked for Mum. Just like a kid from Victorian times who gets to see a parent in order to bid them goodnight, but the rest of the time has to make do with the staff. I said Mum would be ten minutes because I’d have to wake her up first. I put this lullaby tape on that Stroma listened to every night since forever and I knew she’d probably be asleep before anyone made it up there.
Mum hated being woken up. A cup of tea didn’t even scratch the surface of her hatred for it. You could see the world enter her eyes and become fact and pull her back under with the weight of itself. As soon as she was awake she just wanted to go back to sleep again. I knew that we had to be patient, and I do understand that sleep was where she got to pretend her life wasn’t crap, but I also think that two live daughters might have been something to stay awake for.
I rubbed her back for a bit and then I said Stroma was waiting.
She brushed me off and got to her feet and said, “What does she want now?” like it’d been her feeding and bathing and entertaining Stroma all evening, not me.
I said, “She just wants a kiss goodnight,” and Mum rolled her eyes and moved towards the stairs like her whole body was glued down, like it was the last thing on earth she felt like doing.
I watched her and I thought what I always thought – that the old Mum was trapped inside this new one’s body, helpless like a princess in a tower, like a patient on the operating table whose anaesthetic’s failed so she can’t move or call out or let anyone know. She just had to watch with the rest of us while everything went horribly wrong.
With everybody out of the room and all my jobs done and a moment to think, I remembered the boy in the shop and the negative that wasn’t mine. I got it out to have a look. I’d never really seen one before. It was folded over on itself and covered in the dust that lives at the bottom of my bag. It seemed so out of date, shinier on one side than the other, its edges dotted with holes, a clumsy way to carry a picture. I held it up to a lamp.
It’s hard to adjust your eyes to something that’s dark where it should be light. It was like looking at a sea creature or a mushroom, until I saw it was an open mouth and I was holding it upside-down. The mouth was pale where it should be darkest, towards the back of the throat. That’s about all I could see, an open mouth filled with light and two eyes like eyes on fire, the pupils white, the iris shot with sparks against the black eyeballs.
It was a face pushing out light from within, beaming it through the eyes, the open mouth and nostrils, like somebody exhaling a light bulb.
I haven’t mentioned my brother Jack yet, which is odd because he’s the thing most people knew about me then. Wherever I went, being Jack’s sister was my ticket in. It was easy. Everyone loved Jack. I didn’t have to do anything to make them love me too. It was all taken care of.
How would I describe my big brother to someone who doesn’t know him? I could start with nice to look at (my dad’s height, my mum’s skin). Or clever, because learning new stuff just never seemed hard for him. Maybe funny. When you’d been with Jack for a while, I guarantee your stomach muscles would start to ache. And generous, because he’d give anything to his friends if they needed it.
But I don’t want to put anyone off. All of those things are Jack, but not in a smug or annoying way, not so you mind someone else having all the luck. If you ask me, he’s one of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it, who make everyone else wilt just a little when they leave.
There’s two years between us and then nearly ten until Stroma, so we were like the first round of kids, the planned ones I suppose.
If I was going to tell someone just one of my Jack stories, it would be his ‘Map of the Universe’. I think it came free with National Geographic. He’d had it for years, stuck on the inside of his wardrobe door, but no one else had ever really looked at it.
One day Mum was ranting about the mess everywhere and how she couldn’t think