Heart-Shaped Bruise (17 page)

‘I didn’t know what to do with myself,’ I admitted. I waited for her to interrupt. She didn’t. ‘I usually sat in the park and read a book, but by November it was too cold. So one Wednesday I sat on the bus sketching.’

‘Sketching?’

‘Yeah. I’d never done art before and I had to, because Juliet was doing it. I was struggling. People were using spray paint and computers and I didn’t even know to wash the oil paint off my brushes with turps. My tutor was horrified when she caught me rinsing them under the tap.’ I blushed at the memory. ‘I didn’t know why she was being so impatient, but I found out later that I needed a portfolio to get on the course. Turns out Uncle Alex bought one off a student at Central Saint Martins.’

When I looked at Doctor Gilyard again, she was nodding.

‘So I was sitting on the bus practising. I was still shit, but working in pencil was a bit easier because I could rub it out if I did it wrong.’

Doctor Gilyard smiled at that as she scribbled something in her notebook. I wonder if that’s why she writes in pencil, too.

‘What were you sketching?’

‘Things people left behind; jackets on the tube, umbrellas on
park benches. Rubbish, I suppose.’ I shrugged again. ‘But things that would be missed. Like, that afternoon, I was sketching the book on the seat in front of mine on the bus. It was nothing, really, just a cheap novel, but someone will always wonder how that books ends.’

Before I could finish the sketch, someone sat on the seat and picked up the book. I guess I should have been annoyed, but when they started reading it, I couldn’t be mad so I closed my sketchbook and looked up at the gaggle of girls in black-and-white school uniforms who were sitting a few rows in front of me. They kept looking towards the back of the bus, whispering breathlessly about a girl called Amy. Curiosity got the better of me and I turned to find a boy and girl kissing like the world was about to end.

I rolled my eyes and when I turned back, the bus pulled into the next stop. Someone at the front stood up and I don’t think I would have noticed much more than that if the girls hadn’t stopped whispering to watch, utterly rapt, as he walked towards the stairs.

‘Alright, sexy,’ the boldest one said, sitting up and grinning. ‘Where you going?’

I saw the briefest flash of a smile through his dark hair, before he disappeared down the stairs, then I was out of my seat and following him down them.

When I got to the bottom, he was helping a lady with a buggy off the bus.

‘Sid,’ I breathed, and he looked up.

I hadn’t seen him since that night in Juliet’s kitchen so I wasn’t sure how he’d react, but his face lit up when he saw me. ‘Hey, Ro. You alright?’

I nodded.

‘What you doing ’round here?’

I held up my sketchbook with a small smile. ‘You?’

‘I was just saying hello to my dad.’ He nodded over his shoulder.

I hadn’t realised, but we were standing in front of a cemetery. I was so surprised that I dropped my sketchbook. It landed on the pavement with a loud SLAP. ‘Oh I’m sorry. I—’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, with a warm chuckle, bending down to pick it up. As he did, his hair fell forward over his face, so that when he straightened, he pulled it back with his hand and I could see his eyes. I’d never really looked at him before. I mean, I had, of course, but not for more than a few seconds, and not like that, not him looking at me and me looking at him.

‘That was the tipping point, I guess,’ I told Doctor Gilyard. ‘When he asked me if I wanted to meet his dad. He said he wasn’t as mouthy as his mum.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘His father is dead?’

I nodded.

‘Did you know before that day?’

I shook my head.

She began scribbling furiously.

‘Did Juliet know?’

‘No.’ I said it like I was proud, held it up as though it
was proof that I’d meant something to him, that it wasn’t all in my head.

‘How did he die?’

‘Breaking up a fight outside a pub. Smacked his head on the pavement.’

‘That’s very noble.’

I scoffed. ‘Seems like a waste to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Dying like that, in the street, bleeding into the cracks of the pavement while your wife and kid are waiting for you to get home. And for what? To stop a couple of idiots kicking the shit out of each other? He should have left them to it. It’s natural selection.’

Doctor Gilyard nodded. ‘Do you think that’s why Sid did it?’

‘Did what?’

‘Tried to save you.’

I had to look away because I know that’s why he did it. That’s why Sid is the way he is. Something like that would make most people hard. Cold. Not Sid King. His eyes remained wide, his heart restless. If anything, his father dying like that made him see the good in people. I don’t know how, but where most of us would kick and spit at the injustice of it, the way Sid saw it, his father died trying and it made him want to try, too.

When I didn’t respond, Doctor Gilyard moved on. ‘So what happened?’

I’d never been in a cemetery before. I’ve never needed to, which is a good thing, I suppose. Gramps died when I was eight,
but Dad wouldn’t let me go to the cemetery because he said I was too young. I went to the funeral, though. I don’t remember much, just climbing into a big car and umbrellas, everyone had an umbrella. And I remember that the church smelt of furniture polish and blown-out birthday candles.

When Sid led me through the cemetery gates, I held my breath. It was bigger than I had expected; wide and flat and green with a road that cut down the middle. Sid and I didn’t speak as we walked down it, just looked out at the headstones studded across the grass. Most of them were simple; rectangles of moss-softened stone or Celtic crosses that were chewed around the edges. But every now and then we passed an angel standing over a grave, its wings spread, or a plump cherub sitting with its legs crossed.

I didn’t think too much about those graves; they were old and worn with ivy climbing up the sides as though they weren’t there. Maybe in a few years they wouldn’t be, they’d be swallowed completely. Earth to earth, and all that. I thought of Mum then, wondered whether she was lying somewhere under a tangle of brambles. It made my hands shake so much that I rolled up my sketchbook in case Sid saw.

The headstones towards the end of the road were newer, the flowers on them fresher. I passed one shaped like a teddy bear and when I read the dates on it, I had to look away before my brain could do the calculation. I ended up looking at a grave edged with plants instead. An old lady in a heavy wool coat was on her knees next to it, plucking away the dead heads and
kneading the soil in each terracotta pot with her knuckles. She looked up and smiled at Sid and me as we passed and I must have stepped closer to him, because my hip knocked into his. The shock of it made me miss a step.

He asked me if I was alright and when I found my balance again, I nodded, I think. I don’t remember. I just remember staring at a grave with a single red rose on it. Not all of them had flowers on them, but those were the graves I couldn’t look at; the ones no one visited. They looked so empty next to the graves cluttered with wreaths and balloons and those coloured pinwheels you get on Brighton beach. You could tell who was missed. Those graves wailed,
come back
.

It was almost too much, seeing people’s grief like that. It made me wonder what my grave would look like. It wasn’t an unusual thing to think, I suppose, but I realised mine would be one of the empty ones. I decided then to be cremated, that way someone can climb the tree near our cottage in Brighton, throw me in the air and I can fly off on the wings of the seagulls.

I think Sid knew I was freaking out, because he kept turning his head to look at me as he led me towards the back of the cemetery, near the railway tracks. It’s a stupid thing to think, but as we walked past them, I hoped his dad wasn’t near there because it wasn’t a very peaceful place to spend eternity. But Sid stopped under a tree with crooked branches and a fat trunk. It was almost stripped bare, its leaves scattered across the grave like brown confetti. But they were the only things on it. There were no wreaths, no candles, just those leaves and a bunch of
dead roses, their petals dried up and curling.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered when he saw them, reaching down and snatching them out of the vase as though I’d shown up at his flat unexpectedly and he hadn’t done the dishes.

‘It’s okay,’ I started to say, but when I looked at him standing there, the dead flowers dripping on to his trainers, my throat hurt so much that I couldn’t say any more.

Thankfully, I didn’t need to as a woman not much older than Dad approached us with a carrier bag. ‘Here you go, darling,’ she said, smiling at Sid as he put the flowers into it. Some of the petals dropped off as he did and they fell on top of the dead leaves already on the grave. It was actually kind of pretty.

We stood there for a moment, the three of us, me with my sketchbook, Sid with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and her with a bag of dead roses hanging from her finger.

‘My dad,’ he said eventually, nodding at the grave.

Her face brightened. ‘You Gina’s boy?’ Sid smiled, but she frowned. ‘She alright? I ain’t seen in her weeks. She not well?’

‘She’ll be alright.’ He shrugged and looked down at the grave.

‘This your girlfriend?’ she asked, smiling at me.

Sid grinned. ‘This is Rose.’

‘Pleasure to meet you,’ I told her with a small wave.

‘Rose! What a pretty name.’

When I looked at Sid, he was still grinning and as soon as the woman looked down to tie up the plastic bag, he pulled my hair. I swatted his hand away so he did it again and we both giggled. But when I realised that she was watching us, I blushed.

‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ she said, waving her hand at us. ‘Don’t worry. My son was your age so it’s nice to be around teenagers again.’

Was. The word dropped to the grass between us like a cannonball. I was sure I felt the ground shudder beneath my feet and the headstones rattle.

‘This is him,’ she said, nodding at the grave opposite.

She took Sid by the elbow and led him over to it with a wide smile, as though she couldn’t wait to introduce us to him. The grave was one of the ones that wailed,
come back
. There were teddy bears and roses and a red-and-white scarf tied around one of the vases.

I couldn’t look at it.

‘My Jamie,’ she said, squeezing Sid’s arm. ‘A right Jack the lad. Always had people around him. The weekend he died, he’d just come back from Ayia Napa. Seventeen of them went, all boys. I dread to think what they got up to!’

She smiled at Sid and he smiled back, smiled like he meant it, and I don’t know how; it felt like someone had punched me in the chest.

‘He didn’t wear enough sunscreen,’ she told him. ‘He came back bright red! His nose was starting to peel.’ She laughed and touched her own as she looked down at the grave. ‘Seems such a shame to leave him here by himself. He hated being on his own.’

She stopped laughing, then it was so quiet I could hear the faint rumble of a train rattling past the cemetery. I looked at Sid and we exchanged a pained look.

‘Dad was an Arsenal fan, too,’ he said, nodding at the scarf as though he was trying to distract a toddler from having a tantrum. ‘I haven’t been back to the Emirates since he died. I can’t even watch the games on the telly.’

I wanted to step forward then, tell them that I was an Arsenal fan, too, that I couldn’t go back to the Emirates without Dad, either. But the moment wasn’t about me.

We stood there, looking at Jamie’s grave, then she leaned down and scooped a handful of roses from one of the vases. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but when she walked over and put them in the empty vase on Sid’s dad’s grave, my chest felt so tight, I couldn’t breathe. It made me think of Bean. I’d forgotten people could be so nice.

‘That was it,’ I told Doctor Gilyard, lifting my chin defiantly. ‘That was the day everything changed.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I reached for his hand and held it, just for a second.’

‘What did he do?’

‘When I let go, he reached for my hand again and squeezed.’

‘Why do you think he did that, Emily?’

I have to stop now before I say too much.

This is another of those things I need to hold on to. Before I got here, I strung each of my memories together – the good ones, the ones about Mum and Sid and the dad I knew, the dad who put me on his shoulders at Arsenal games and read me
Goodnight Moon
when I couldn’t sleep and came to all my cello recitals – and at night I would thumb through them like rosary beads.

I can’t do that any more. Now I have to lock them away where no one will find them so they can’t take them away from me. That’s it, isn’t it? It’s not that Doctor Gilyard can’t have them, it’s that I’m terrified she’ll say
I
can’t have them.

That I don’t deserve to keep them after everything I’ve done.

I’m in the bathroom again. I don’t know what time it is, but my brain is spinning. Tumbling, actually, like a ball down a hill. Why am I writing this? I should stop. I should close this notebook and never write another word, but here I am, in this bathtub – my toes curling, I’m shivering so much.

I’ve never told anyone my story before. I’ve never had to; everyone knows it. I thought that’s what this is – my side of the story. But the blackness that began to creep into the corners of my life after Juliet stabbed Dad is getting closer. I can feel it. Everything is greyer now. Memories that used to be as clean as glass are smudged. I think that’s why I’m writing it all down, in case the blackness wins. I can feel it sometimes, chewing at the edges of my brain. If it ever devours the rest of me, these are the things I’ll want to remember.

So I’d better keep going.

As soon as we left the cemetery, Sid announced that he was hungry. I think he was trying to ease the awkwardness of the moment, or he was hungry, which is equally likely. Whatever his reasons, we ended up getting chips and eating them in the park.

It was only 4 o’clock, but the day had started to dim. Winter was coming. A chill nipped at the tops of my ears and steam rose, thick and fast, from the bag of chips I was cupping in my hand. The heat of them warmed the bones in my fingers and the air smelt of salt and onion vinegar. I haven’t eaten chips since then, but even now, thinking of that smell reminds me of that afternoon, of how Sid and I just walked and walked.