Chapter Thirty-Five
Saturday
Ruby:
On Boxing Day, Oscar wakes me by shaking my shoulder hard. “Ruby.”
“Go away,” I hiss, trying to snuggle more into Josh.
“Get up,” he snaps.
I crack one eye open and find him standing beside my bed, looking all serious and grim. It forces me upright, assessing my twin in the dark of the morning. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes slide to Josh. “Not in here. Let’s talk downstairs.”
“But why?”
“Ruby,” he barks. “Just come downstairs.” Oscar pauses, an undercurrent of tension on his features. “Please.”
I don’t need much more than that to know something is really wrong.
Carefully, I climb out of bed, tug the duvet back over Josh when he shifts in his sleep and grab my dressing gown from the chair, following Oscar out into the hallway while trying to work out what could possibly have happened overnight.
Oscar walks straight into the kitchen. There are glasses on the coffee table, a paper Christmas crown abandoned on the arm of the sofa and bits of wrapping paper Mum missed despite going around with a bin bag three separate times.
He sits at the little round table by the window, the one surrounded by four completely mismatched chairs Mum has collected over the years.
One is painted white, another is dark wood, one has a woven seat and the last is this faded green thing that should look ridiculous next to the others but somehow doesn’t.
Mum is really good at making things that shouldn’t go together look intentional.
I sit opposite him and pull my dressing gown tighter around myself. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
Oscar doesn’t answer straight away. He reaches into the pocket of his hoodie instead and puts a Christmas card on the table between us, sliding it across the wood with two fingers.
My eyes dart between his face and the envelope. “What’s that?”
His jaw tightens, and his mood doesn’t match the pj’s Emma got him. She plastered her smiling face all over them. “Dad dropped it through the door this morning.”
I reach across the table and rub my fingers along the blank envelope. He couldn’t even be bothered to write our names. “Dad came here?”
“Yeah.” Oscar grimaces. “I was about to go for a run when this came through the letterbox. I opened the door and he was walking away.”
I feel my chest go odd and tight. “Did Mum see? Does she know?”
“No.”
“Good.” I nod. “That’s good.”
Oscar gives a small nod then pushes the envelope closer to me. “It’s for us.”
I pick it up and pull the card free. It’s expensive-looking and completely generic, gold lettering across the front with some meaningless Christmas message printed inside and tucked behind it is a thick stack of notes. “He’s given us five hundred pounds?”
Oscar is not impressed. He looks repulsed. “Yeah.”
Five hundred pounds from the man who fucked my eighteen-year-old best friend in my bed, then made me carry the secret for him while everything in my life slowly fell apart.
Five hundred pounds from a man who has been cut out of this family because of what he did, as though shoving money through the letterbox on Boxing Day somehow counts as parenting.
I look back down at the card. “He didn’t even write anything?”
“No.” Oscar’s jaw ticks, fingers thrumming against the wood. “Because he’s a fucking coward.”
“I mean…” I’m at a loss. “What did he think we would do with this? Is this supposed to be met with gratitude? Does he think we’ll be sat here crying because he finally remembered us after nearly three years?”
“I really don’t know.” Oscar leans back in his chair. “I nearly went after him, you know. Fuck. I’d love to knock him out. Just once.”
“Oscar,” I chide. “What would that solve?”
“I don’t know but I think it would make me feel better.”
I reach across the table and squeeze his hand, clinging on to it. “Maybe. But probably not. He wouldn’t be worth the sore knuckles.”
“I hate that he came here. This is Mum’s house. Our safe place. He should never be here or this close to you.”
“I’m okay.” I tell him quickly. “I mean, I don’t want the money at all, but it might help Mum.”
Oscar shakes his head. “She won’t want it and I’m not sure we should tell her. This is the happiest she’s been in ages. She was even singing as she did the dishes last night.”
I level him with a look. “We have to tell her.”
“I don’t think I can.” He looks down at our joined hands, brown eyes tracking my thumb as it tries to soothe him. “She’ll completely freak and get all sad.”
“Or she’ll buy herself a really fancy bag and tell herself he’s a waste of space.”
Oscar pulls his hand back. “The man nearly killed you, Ruby. No amount of money fixes that.”
“He didn’t nearly kill me.” I try to explain, but it’s something Oscar has never been able to accept.
“I nearly killed myself.” Looking at the wonky clock behind his head, I see it’s five in the morning.
“At some point, O, you’re going to have to accept I chose to try and end my life.
I thought it was the best possible thing to do at the time.
We can’t completely blame Dad for a decision I made. ”
Oscar’s face is blistering. “I can blame him. If he never made you keep his affair secret, bullied you about it, made you feel like you were the problem, then you never would’ve gone into that bathroom and done what you did.”
I flinch at how bluntly he says it, but I don’t let go of the money. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You don’t, O.” I shake my head, looking down at the notes between my fingers.
“I was already struggling. Dad was part of it, a massive part, but he wasn’t the only thing going on in my head.
There was so much to it. There was Ansel, and Dad, and just…
life. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t want to feel any of it anymore.
” I swallow thickly, rubbing my thumb over the edge of one of the notes.
“But now I think not feeling is almost the same as dying anyway. I wanted everything to stop because I couldn’t imagine it ever getting better, and at the time that felt like the only way to make it quiet. ”
Oscar shudders and I know I’ve put him back in that bathroom with me bleeding out on the floor. I hate that I did that to him. Hate that for the rest of his life he will be affected by it.
“I’m not saying Dad didn’t push me closer,” I add, trying to make it sound less brutal than it all was.
“He did. What he did was disgusting and making me keep it secret made everything worse. But I don’t want you spending the rest of your life telling yourself that if Dad hadn’t done that one thing, then I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself. You don’t know that, and neither do I.”
“You tried to kill yourself?” A husky voice from the doorway makes every muscle in my body lock.
Oscar and I spin in unison. Josh is standing there in tartan pyjamas, hair flattened on one side from sleep, but there’s nothing sleepy about his face. His green eyes are fixed on me with an intensity that makes breathing feel impossible.
“Josh…” I start, heart pounding. Of all the ways I wanted him to find out, it was never like this.
“You tried to kill yourself?” He demands, face flicking through a thousand emotions.
I push my chair back and slowly stand. “Yeah. A few years ago.”
Josh’s face drains of colour and his hand reaches up to press against his chest. “What? When? When did you—how old were you?”
“I was fifteen.”
“Sixteen,” Oscar corrects from the table. “You were fifteen when it started and sixteen when—”
“Oscar,” I hiss, not taking my eyes off Josh, heart pounding harshly. “Shut up.”
Josh looks like he can’t breathe at all, he’s rubbing his chest and his eyes are darting everywhere. “You were sixteen?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” He backs up a step, shaking his head. His breathing is all out of whack and his chest is heaving. “I can’t breathe.”
I fight to keep my confusion at bay. I mean, yeah, people always have a reaction to it.
Shock, pity, awkward silence, the frantic oh my God, are you okay now?
thing everyone seems to default to when they don’t know what else to say.
But Josh looks like a ghost has risen from the grave and screamed ‘boo’ right at him.
“Josh,” I try to soothe, walking around the table. “It’s okay. It was ages ago.”
His eyes track me as I move. “You never told me.”
My blood is pounding in my ears. “I was going to.”
“When? Hm? When were you going to tell me?” Reaching up he rubs his forehead, emanating a wild, restless energy.
“It all makes so much sense. All those times Oscar asked if you were okay. Your mum constantly checking in. The Wednesday thing. Fuck, even Christmas yesterday, the way everyone kept looking at you. I thought they were just protective.”
“They are protective.”
“It’s more than that though, Ruby. It’s so much more than that.” He pushes his palm flat over his heart and struggles to suck in air. “I really can’t fucking breathe.”
My own panic starts to climb tenfold. “Okay. Okay, sit down.” I usher towards him, but he doesn’t move. “Josh?” His skin has gone pale and there is a sheen of sweat gathering along his forehead. “Can you sit?”
His eyes have fixed over my shoulder, not really looking at anything, and the words seem to have emptied him out. He has gone completely stiff, every part of him locked up and frozen except for his fingers which are twitching every few seconds.
Oscar is prone to panic attacks, his therapist said it was PTSD from finding me half-dead on the floor, but Oscar’s attacks are nothing like this. He gets restless and irritable, starts pacing. Josh seems to have detached himself from reality entirely. He isn’t in the room with us anymore.
“Josh?” I move closer, trying to keep my voice steady, even if I am thoroughly freaked out. “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” he answers, voice showing no emotion at all, almost robotic and totally cold.
“Okay. Good. Can you look at me?”