Chapter 3
“Did I wake you?” Shelley says, as I arrive in the kitchen and sink down at the table, using my arms to lower myself into my seat. “I wasn’t sure whether to leave you or not. I did look in once or twice to check you were okay. Coffee?”
“Anything,” I say. “Coffee, tea, a muddy puddle . . . I’m parched.”
“Well,” Shelley says.
“Well, what?” I know it’s not even nine o’clock yet and it was gone midnight when I went up. Shelley puts a mug of Nescafé in front of me, granules clinging to the teaspoon. I reach for the sugar bag.
“You slept round the clock, Lindsay,” she says. “It’s Wednesday.”
I blink at her and take a slug of the horrible coffee.
“I think I was tired,” I say. “My eyes were playing tricks. Still are.” Because Shelley, who should be as large as life sitting opposite me, looks as flat as a paper doll, her clothes held on with tabs over her shoulders.
It makes me feel sicker than it should somehow.
“Have you been sleeping?” she asks me. “Before this, I mean.”
I laugh. I’ve been sleeping like I’ve been eating.
“Well, there you go then,” she says, back to brisk normal. Then even brisker, “So what’s on the cards today?”
Got it, I want to say but don’t. No snivelling. She’s already standing up and turning away from me to face the sink, where she has dumped out about a wheelbarrow load of muddy spinach to start picking over.
“Chloe, I suppose.” She’s my oldest friend, one fifth of the reason I’m back here, as well as John, Shelley and the boys.
“Ask her for dinner.”
“What are you making?” I can’t imagine my brother eating any dish that green.
“This isn’t for us,” she says. “This is for the free fridge.”
I don’t know what that is and I don’t ask.
Another thing about grief is how dull it turns you.
I don’t mean to other people, although that’s probably true too.
But I feel dull to myself. Uninterested and unenthusiastic, I let news and gossip, sights and sounds wash over me without bothering to have a single thought about any of them.
I know why. It’s because there’s no point finding out what a free fridge is, or when John started playing poker, even what the hell was in that herbal tea that knocked me out and filled my sleep with nightmares.
I can’t tell Kai any of it, so who cares.
“I need to find a place to live,” I say.
“Don’t talk daft,” Shelley tells me, wiping her hands on the front of her jeans and turning away from the sink again. “This is your home for as long as you need. Anyway, when does your stuff arrive?”
It’s true that my container won’t be quick getting here from the dot in the Pacific that used to feel like my whole world, but I don’t need to wait for it.
Upstairs, I sit on the bed for a while, summoning the energy to put my shoes on.
It’s in the same place as mine always was, this new bed, and the rest of the furniture was too solid and well fitted to change, but the carpet and walls are grey now and my pony stickers have gone from the drawer fronts, replaced by monsters and villains.
I suppose some of them must be heroes, but they look like pure evil to me. I go to stare out the window instead.
In daylight, the view is so much the same that I can almost believe, if I push the blue and grey curtains out of sight, that I’m twelve again, with my mum downstairs in the kitchen.
Except I wouldn’t be up here looking at it.
I’d be out there in it, with John, on an adventure.
Even once we’d grown out of pirates and spacemen, there were still plenty of adventures.
Breaking and entering was the one that lasted longest: My brother and I knew more secret ways into the back of Lord’s Yard than my dad ever dreamed of.
Other kids sneak out of their houses to go and get up to mischief. We sneaked in.
There was a tree hard against the fence at one corner.
After John had hammered nails into its trunk as footholds, we’d wriggle out along an overhanging branch on our bellies and drop down the other side.
He did it in a single smooth movement, lengthways to crosswise to letting go to landing.
I never got that bold, no matter how many times he told me it was easier without all the hesitation.
“You’re losing momentum,” he’d say. “You’re making it harder.
” I knew he was right but still I sat upright on the branch, took a moment to consider the drop, then carefully edged my body over to one side, hands sweaty and scraped, and I always dangled for a good long time before I let go, ignoring him laughing at me.
I preferred the other way anyway. A bit farther on from the tree, there was a section of corrugated iron that looked as secure as any of the rest of my dad’s mishmash fencing—more so perhaps—except John and I knew it was only leaning on the post it should have been screwed to.
Better still, underneath it was a sheet of laminate from an old wardrobe, slick as a skating rink, that the iron slid over more or less at a touch.
“Bo-ring,” John would say. “Yawn.”
So when I found a third entrance, I kept it from him.
I scan the boundary now, searching for the right place, for the bright mustard paint of a shipping container and the snarl of barbed wire rolled up on top of a row of filing cabinets.
I can’t see either of them, never mind the dark stretch in between, and that makes sense.
Because a junkyard is an ecosystem all of its own, not that different from a compost heap, just a bit slower.
Stuff comes in—microwaves and medicine spoons, toasters and bud vases, walking sticks and fireplace inserts.
It gets picked over and shuffled. Then, if no one buys it, it gradually sinks under newer stuff.
Weathered barrels collapsing, sun-faded plastic shattering, it succumbs to the elements until it’s right at the back or right at the bottom.
Eventually, like all of us, it returns to the earth.
It’s a gentler way to go than how Kai was ripped from me.
I blink and turn to let the grey chevron strips of my nephew’s bedroom curtains resettle me in the present.
I don’t want to pretend I’m back in the before, with my life to live over again.
I wouldn’t go in a different direction and I couldn’t change how it all turned out.
I would still say yes when he proposed. I would pick eight years with Kai over fifty with anyone else.
So wishing my way back to my childhood would mean having to live through this again. And that would break me.
Maybe I broke anyway, I think, as once again the view thins and flattens, sliding around until I’m dizzy. I squeeze my eyes shut. Jet lag. Keep moving. Like Shelley said: What’s on the cards today?
I can go out into the bowels of the yard and look around, like a customer.
I’m grown up. It’s different now. I need a table, a couple of chairs, and somewhere to sleep, if I’m going to move out of here.
A couch would be nice too, and, as my dad’s advertisements used to say until someone from the Pentecostal place in Alloa complained about them: Lord’s will provide.
I sit back down to do up my trainers, the villains and monsters watching me.
My pony stickers were just shiny, but these guys have holograms built in, moving eyes and shimmering ghosts of their other selves.
I decide to call the worst one Glioblastoma.
That’s what he looks like to me. “What will we call that little slimy one?” I ask Kai.
“Radiation? Chemo suite? Cranial saw?” Ugly words for ugly things.
Outside, I avoid the Portakabin where my dad would be sitting then, where John sits now, taking calls and watching the cameras, all crowded round with crystal decanters and carriage clocks, resting his arms on the glass counter of a jeweller’s display case full of worn rings and strings of pearls, barricaded in with sets of golf clubs.
John lives here, works there, and he’s fine. I’ll be fine too.
Next to the cabin is the big shed with the best security that was always kept for appliances, the real money spinners.
Decent sets of furniture were in the least rickety of the other sheds, along with the hotel refurbishment overstock.
Odd chairs and occasional tables were stacked in the polytunnel, where damage wouldn’t matter so much; curtains and carpets went in a kind of carport that kept the rain off but let a breeze through.
China and glass was out in the elements on old shop fitments, gradually filling with rain and leaves, fading if no one bought them, eventually breaking as they were shoved back to put new things in front.
I skirt the appliance shed, since surely anywhere I rent will have a cooker and washer already, and I don’t bother with the suites and good couches covered in plastic wrap.
I ignore the battalions of toilets, sinks, and baths, all with their taps, plugs, and handles neatly taped inside them, and I carry on past the gates and sections of fencing leaning hard enough against the books trailer to make it look as if it might tip over.
Eventually I get to where I need to be. I snap a picture of a new, line-end mattress sealed in its cover, switching off the flash to make sure the item number, scrawled in marker pen on the plastic, is visible. I text it to John in the Portakabin.
I pick out an armchair that looks clean and feels comfy, and is small enough to fit in my hire car if I put the seats down.
Then I carry on, deeper into the archaeology of the odds shed.
There was a vinyl table with chrome edges the last time I was here.
That’s gone, although I find a school laboratory desk still with its graffiti fresh and proud: Hibernian FC, Keep Beliebin’, Chloe is a slag.
Different Chloe, but I take a picture anyway.