Authors: Sarah Butler
They waited for Bea, standing in the foyer by a noticeboard pinned with adverts for yoga and sports massage and toddler groups.
‘Will you come for lunch?’ Jen asked, and before he could answer she said, ‘She would love it, Kieran, if you came. She really would.’
And then Bea was there, her hair all wet and messed up, wrapping her arms around his legs. And so he went, holding Bea’s hand as they walked to the cafe. Wooden tables, fairy lights,
pointless home-made craft stuff for sale in the corner. Crap music on the radio. Weird things on the menu: goat’s cheese and tofu and couscous. He ordered a burger and a Coke, which arrived
just as the radio went to its news bulletin. The woman behind the bar turned it up and the other people in the cafe stopped talking, tilted their heads to one side to listen, the way Shelia had
when she was pretending to channel Sophie’s spirit, or whatever it was she was supposed to do.
There was rioting in London. All night people had been running into shops and taking what they wanted. It was chaos, a woman kept saying, sounding panicked and excited at the same time.
‘London?’ Stick looked at Jen. Her cheeks were pink, like someone had drawn circles of paint onto them.
Mac had hated London, even though he’d never been.
Full of bankers and wankers
, he said.
Gets all the money and all the attention, and they still ponce about
whinging.
‘I just feel sorry for that man’s family,’ Jen said.
‘The black guy?’
Jen narrowed her eyes and nodded. ‘Your son gets shot by the police, you’re going to want some answers,’ she said. ‘But it’s out of hand now, by the sounds of
it.’
Stick tugged a bit of lettuce out of his burger and dropped it on the plate. He wanted some answers too. Maybe he should start a riot in Manchester – throw shit at the police, set fire to
something, keep on doing it until someone fucking explained.
The radio had gone back to playing music – a guy crooning about a girl who loved someone else.
‘I used to live in London,’ Jen said. ‘Not where all that’s happening. I was in Clapham.’
Stick looked up in surprise and she laughed. ‘I didn’t come into existence when I married your dad, you know.’
Stick thought about the photo of Jen and his dad on the mantelpiece in their living room – his dad in a suit, Jen in a white dress with her head tipped back, laughing, confetti blurring
around them. It sat in a crowd of other photos, of Bea and Rosie and one of him too, his hair longer than it was now, scowling at the camera. Stick had refused to go to the wedding. His mum had
half-heartedly tried to make him, and then shrugged and took him to the Trafford Centre, bought him new trainers and a new tracksuit, let him order whatever he wanted in McDonald’s.
‘Why did you marry him anyway?’ Stick said.
She laughed. She looked pretty when she laughed. ‘He’s kind,’ she said. ‘He’s funny. He cares.’ She brushed a bit of hair away from her eyes.
‘We’re all right, Kieran. Your dad and me, you don’t need to worry about that.’
He wasn’t worried about that. He was worried that Owen Lee was walking the streets of Manchester, laughing about getting away with it. He was worried about his mum. He was worried
he’d forget what Mac looked like, what Mac’s voice sounded like. He was worried he couldn’t think of one single job he wanted to do and he’d never have any money or anywhere
to live and J would realise he was a loser and leave him before they’d even had sex.
‘What is it that you want, Kieran?’ Jen said.
The tears surprised him. He didn’t let them out, but he felt them pushing up towards his eyes and had to blink them away. She saw; he could tell by the way she looked at him. He was about
to get up and walk out, but she put her hand on his forearm.
‘It’s a difficult question,’ she said.
Stick took another mouthful of his burger. It seemed to get bigger the more he chewed. He breathed in through his nose – tried again. Chew, swallow, chew, swallow.
‘What do you want for you?’ Jen said. ‘For your life.’
She’d ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. It looked disgusting. Stick watched her cut a neat triangle of pink fish and place it on top of a square of toast and egg, then stab her
fork through the whole thing.
He swallowed again, his mouth empty at last. ‘Is that what all this is for?’ he asked. ‘You bring me here, buy me lunch and then start on about that double-glazing job? Is Dad
about to turn up with a contract?’
Jen smiled and shook her head. ‘I know you don’t want the job.’
‘So what are you on about?’
‘I know what you don’t want,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to know what you do want. I’m interested.’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ She fussed about, arranging egg and salmon on another tiny square of toast. ‘What do you like?’ she asked.
Stick shrugged.
Jen put her knife and fork down. ‘OK. What makes you excited?’
J. The way she looked at him when she took her bra off. He couldn’t say that to Jen.
They were back talking about the riots on the radio. That was exciting. London was two hours on the train away from Manchester. Fires. People throwing bricks through windows and no one stopping
them.
‘I get it, Kieran, I do.’
‘No offence, Jen, but you have no fucking idea.’
She glanced towards Rosie and Bea, who sat with colouring books, the pages a mess of felt-tip scribbles.
‘No fucking idea,’ Stick said, louder this time.
‘OK, fine. Look. Close your eyes.’
Stick folded his arms over his chest.
She sighed. ‘Ten years’ time,’ she said. ‘You’re twenty-eight. It’s Monday morning. Your alarm goes.’
‘Bippity beep. Bippity beep.’ Stick met her gaze but she didn’t flinch.
‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘In bed.’
‘Close your eyes. Where’s the bed?’
‘Is this hypnosis or something?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Because I’ve got enough of that with crazy Alan.’
‘Close your eyes. Tell me where you are.’
Stick looked at the row of houses opposite the cafe. Net curtains in folds across a window. Ivy creeping up towards a roof. Where was he? A double bed. J next to him, her hair blue or pink or
black or orange, spread out over the pillow. Downstairs, a little kitchen diner, a living room with big leather sofas. A dog – maybe a pug – curled up in a basket by the back door.
‘Are you getting up to go to work?’ Jen asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.’ He could feel the tears again. ‘Can you leave it?’ he snapped.
She sat back, looking a bit deflated. ‘I’m just trying to help.’
He’d thought his dad had put her up to it, but suddenly he wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just being nice.
Jen placed her knife and fork together across her empty plate. ‘Perhaps you could try making a list,’ she said.
He would go back to his nan’s, get in bed, go to sleep. He could imagine it, the duvet warm and soft against his chin. The water ticking in the pipes. The noise of traffic seeping in
through the window.
‘A list of things you like. Things you’re good at,’ Jen continued. ‘It might give you some ideas.’
‘I’m not good at anything.’
‘That is not true.’ She said it so forcefully he almost laughed. ‘It isn’t,’ she said. ‘Look at you and Bea.’
Bea glanced up. ‘I’m a dolphin,’ she said, and held out the medal that still hung around her neck.
Jen stroked Bea’s hair. ‘Some people haven’t got the first idea how to talk to kids.’ She paused. ‘And your mum.’
‘What about her?’
‘I coloured in the princess.’ Bea held her colouring book out towards Stick. The picture was of a thin-waisted girl with big hair and a long dress, a poodle sitting in her lap. Bea
had scribbled over the whole thing in blue.
‘Pin-cess,’ Rosie said. Jen leaned over with a tissue and wiped Rosie’s snotty nose.
‘What do you mean, and my mum?’ Stick said.
‘I just meant, the OCD and—’
‘How do you even know that?’
‘And you deal with that great. You might do – I don’t know – nursery work? Care work?’
Stick picked up the salt and poured a pile of it onto his plate. He glanced at Jen. She had blonde eyelashes, the same as Mac’s used to be. He tried out the words in his head before he let
them out. ‘She said she’d go to the doctor’s but I know she hasn’t.’
There was a long pause. Jen was looking at him, but he wouldn’t catch her eye. Rosie scribbled over a picture of a donkey, the pen scratching at the paper, round and round and round.
‘It’s something she’s got to sort out herself,’ Jen said. ‘You can’t do it for her, however much you want to.’
Stick pushed the salt into a line, then a square, then a line again. ‘Do you think I’ll end up like that?’ he said.
Jen frowned.
‘Checking plugs and locking doors and whatever?’
She was looking at him like he wasn’t making any sense. ‘It’s not hereditary,’ she said.
He meant would he end up like his mum because of Mac, because he couldn’t get over him dying. Would he get stuck? He wanted to ask her how you got over someone dying without them just
disappearing into nothing, like you’d never cared about them in the first place. Instead, he said, ‘I like building.’
‘Building?’
‘Construction.’
Jen nodded, her lips pulling down a bit at the edges, and Stick felt himself flush red.
‘What, it’s too rough? It’s for stupid people? You don’t want your precious girls with a fucking bricklayer for a half-brother.’ It was easier, being angry.
‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ he said.
Jen shook her head, but Stick kept talking; he couldn’t stop himself. ‘You and your snobby house and your snobby pizzas and Sunday lunches and holidays in fucking France, the lot of
you looking down at me.’
Rosie started crying, her voice rising into a high-pitched wail. Jen reached over and patted her arm. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, it’s OK. What a beautiful donkey, Rosie.
Aren’t you a clever girl?’
Stick looked around the cafe. Everything was too close together: too many things on the tables – stacked glasses and water jugs and brown paper menus propped between the ketchup and the
salt; too many things on the walls – wooden boxes filled with wooden letters, pictures made out of fragile-looking bits of paper; too many people.
‘Actually, my brother’s in construction,’ Jen said, once Rosie had settled. ‘I could talk to him.’
Stick drew a circle in the pile of salt.
‘He has a few boys working for him. One of them just did a course, I think. On a day release thing. In Salford, or somewhere.’
Stick stared at his plate and shrugged.
Jen sucked her tongue against her teeth. ‘It’s up to you, Kieran. The offer’s there. I can call him, put you in touch.’ She paused, and then said in a gentler voice,
‘You’re a great lad, Kieran. You can do whatever you want to do, but the world isn’t going to come towards you if you don’t go towards the world.’
‘Can I get a lift home?’
Jen started to say something else.
‘My head hurts,’ Stick said.
She pressed her lips together and looked at him for a long time, then stood up, saying, ‘All right, fine. Let me pay.’
Stick sat in the passenger seat and tried to work out how to tell Jen he was sorry – that he knew she was just trying to help; that he knew he was being a twat but
sometimes he couldn’t seem to help it. He glanced in the rear mirror at the girls, like little astronauts strapped into their chairs. I like them, he wanted to tell Jen, I really do.
I’m glad they’re around. But he wasn’t much good at saying things like that.
He didn’t register she’d driven him to his mum’s until they came to a stop outside the house. His mum was in the front garden picking dead leaves off the plant with the orange
berries. It was too late to ask Jen to turn around and take him to his nan’s.
‘Thanks,’ he said, opening the car door. ‘For lunch and that.’
‘No problem,’ Jen said. ‘Oh. Bea’s card.’ She leaned across to the glove compartment and pulled out a piece of paper folded in half. ‘That’s you.’
She pointed at a tall figure drawn in red crayon with a massive black bandage around the head. ‘And that says get better soon.’ She pointed to a scrawl of yellow crayon at the bottom of
the picture.
‘Thanks, Bea.’ Stick turned in his seat and smiled at the girls, but they were both fast asleep.
‘We’ll see you next weekend?’ Jen asked.
Stick nodded. ‘Sure.’ He hesitated, then said in a mumble, ‘You’re all right, Jen.’
Jen laughed.
‘I just mean—’ He felt himself blushing.
She smiled. ‘Thanks. Now take care of that head of yours, won’t you?’
He got out, waved as Jen did a three-point turn.
His mum opened her arms when she saw him. ‘Kieran! I thought— I didn’t realise—’ Her eyes followed Jen’s car down the street. ‘How are you,
love?’
‘My head feels like someone’s hitting it with a hammer,’ he said, and then looked at her expression and regretted it. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘They let me
out.’
‘The police called,’ she said, and Stick was suddenly alert.
‘They’ve recharged him?’
‘About the car, love. I said you’d call them back,’ she said. ‘I’ve written the number down. It’s in the kitchen, I think.’
Stick lifted his face up to the sky – flat grey clouds; the blink of an aeroplane’s wing light. His head throbbed. His body hurt even more than yesterday. His eyes felt like someone
had taken them out, rubbed them in sand and put them back in again.
‘You’re home then?’ She sounded so hopeful he didn’t know what to do except shrug. ‘I’m at work two till eight,’ she said. ‘If I’d known
I’d have tried to swap shifts. But I’ll bring us back something nice for tea, shall I?’
‘It was an accident, Mum.’ He looked at her. ‘Dad said you thought I’d tried to top myself.’
‘Oh.’ She picked off another dead leaf and rubbed it between her fingers so it crackled. ‘Oh, well that’s good then, isn’t it?’
When she’d left for work, Stick went upstairs and lay face down on his bed. His mum had washed the sheets. They smelt of soap and summer. Make a list, Jen had said, like
he was still at school. She’d been trying to help, though. She hadn’t told him to take the double-glazing job.