Etched on Me Page 14

  13

  And so I became a concrete mixer, pouring the foundation of a new life down. I’d much rather have promoted myself to architect and sketched turrets and skylights, but Dr. P. insisted that I not go in for flourishes and grand plans till I’d gone off the self-harm for good.

  All told, it took four months, and I worked my arse off to get there:

  Pacing the floor.

  Drawing mock cuts in red marker on my arms.

  Telling myself to wait just five more minutes, and then, if I still felt that awful, I could do it.

  Playing guitar, both to distract myself and (yes, I’ll admit it) relish the brutal-but-productive press of metal into my fingertips.

  Analyzing my choices ad nauseam on Dr. P.’s whiteboard, drilling down with her dry-erase marker, my sloppy arrows delineating what she called a “behavior chain”: This is what made me vulnerable in the situation, this is what I thought, this is what the thought made me feel, this is how the feeling made me act, this was the short-term payoff, this was the long-term consequence.

  Kickboxing in the Lodge’s gym, sweat in my eyes, my wrapped knuckles poised, my punches sloppy with fury.

  Splashing handful after handful of water on my face, shuddering, reset by the bracing slapshock.

  Paging Dr. P. at midnight, screaming “I can’t make it better!” (To which she replied dryly, “Well, then, don’t make it worse.”)

  Bellowing entire albums worth of songs, paying no mind to Carina pounding on my bedroom door and bellowing back, “What the fuck you think this place is, the Nutter Idol stage?”

  Fifth of November. That’s my version of a clean-and-sober date. Every year since, I’ve gone down the florist’s and bought myself a bouquet of Bouvardias and baby’s breath. Used to put it in an antique fluted vase I got at Camden Passage, but this autumn I reckon it’ll just be a few sad daises in a chipped mug.

  • • •

  Bonfire Night. I lay on my back on my bed, fresh off a gym session, my freshly washed hair trickling droplets down the back of my neck. With calloused fingers, I traced the glued outlines of the magazine photos Miss had clipped for her soul postcard: guitar, spoon, book, lover’s shoulder, blossoming belly.

  I closed my eyes. Held the card to my chest. Got up, shuffled over to my desk, and propped the card back up against my copy of Ulysses. Gave its outline a loving stroke, like it was the narrow face of my greyhoundie, then padded down the hall in my sock feet.

  In the kitchen, a bunch of the younger girls were dipping apples into a vat of melted toffee, staff stationed round them in a protective huddle. I sat atop the table and watched them shove each other as they speared the fruit. “Want one, Les?”

  “Yeah, please,” I said, and reached over for a lopsided apple.

  When I bit in, my mouth filled with richness, my lips smarted with sugarburn. Sticky slither down my chin. Tart crunch in my teeth. Fingers tipped with drippy melt. I sucked them clean, clear to the second knuckle. Passed an imaginary apple slice to Clare off my tongue. Silently told her: Blow it all to bits. I’ll watch the sky for the smoke.

  I slid down from the table. Wiped my mouth with the side of my hand, turned to the staff, and asked, in my best I’m so not messing around voice, “There somebody I can talk to about getting started on my A-levels?”

  • • •

  Once again, Francesca came to the rescue and got me booked in distance learning courses for English and Psychology (no, I didn’t get an automatic pass) and, thrillingly, studio time at a local school’s recording workshop for Music Technology.

  Granted, that last one was outside of normal class times, with a Claymoor Lodge staffer parked at the door in case I’d a mind to asphyxiate myself with electrical cords, but still. Total paradise, that place: big mixing board, racks full of effects processors. I holed up in there for hours, singing from under the console, hidden beneath the table with a mike trailing down so I could burrow inside my little sonic cave. I drummed on the floor and tabletop till my palms smarted. Drank three glasses of milk and crunched half a bar of revolution chocolate so my voice got ragged and phlegmy. Flanged the bejesus out of my guitar so it sounded like a buzz saw.

  The first demos sounded like a knockoff mash-up of Kate Bush and Bjőrk, but I was so pleased with myself I didn’t care. After that I went all experimental and borrowed Dr. P.’s copy of the DSM to troll for spoken-word bits. For my composition submission, I mixed six tracks of me reading the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, distorted until the entire list became a choral blur over a synthesized siren wail.

  And I did it all without Miss hurrying me along. We kept in touch regularly on the phone, of course, but between sending her son off to the hallowed halls of you-know-where and her adoption homestudy, she visited me far less often that autumn—which actually didn’t bother me. I was always glad to see her, but it was also a relief to get some space, figure out my future on my own terms.

  She came up at Christmas bearing an armful of gifts wrapped in holly-and-ivy paper, her other arm reaching out to hug me with a fierceness that felt almost needy. “I’ve missed you, darlin’.”

  We went to my room and sat cross-legged on my bed, her pile of presents between us. “Where’s Jascha?” I asked.

  “Doing more ice topiaries for the Russian oligarchs,” she said. “Hedonistic holiday bash in South Ken.”

  I frowned. “So he didn’t want to c—”

  “Oh, he did, honey, he did.” She put her hand on my arm for a second, then drew back. “We just . . .” She raised the same hand to her face, rubbing her forehead. “This homestudy, it’s costing us . . . Well, you don’t want to know how much it’s costing.” She patted the duvet and its bevy of packages, putting on an overdone smile. “Come on. Open them.”

  Not until you stop acting all weird, I wanted to say, but her expression was so pleading I couldn’t refuse. One by one, I picked at the gifts’ taped seams, ripping them to find guitar tab books, a Bjőrk T-shirt that said Sod Off, and a music download gift card attached to a little white box with a picture of an iPod on the front.

  “Oh my God!” I squealed, so girly it was mortifying.

  Miss smiled wanly. “You like?”

  “Flipping love it.”

  “Good.” She stared down at the crumpled wrapping paper, tracing its trail of vines with one finger.

  “Something’s wrong, though,” I said.

  Her gaze flickered up. “There is?”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I mean with you.”

  My voice sounded so much like hers—well, at least her old one—that it shocked us both.

  “The caseworkers are putting us through hell,” she said hoarsely. “They pulled my decade-old therapy records from America, and now they’re making Jasch undergo some—some sort of psychological profile, to prove he’s not . . .” She trailed off, her lips turning down in anguished affront.

  “Like my dad?” I whispered.

  She gave a strangled nod.

  Jesus. Those fuckers. My fists clenched. My mind scrambled—not with thoughts of what this might herald for me years later, but for solutions. Dr. P. was big on “solution thinking.” Tough situations aren’t threats, just challenges, she always liked to remind.

  “Talk to Francesca,” I said. “You know how good she is at sorting stuff out.”

  “But these are her colleagues,” Miss said, so quietly I could barely hear her. “I can’t ask her to risk her job, not after all she’s done for y—”

  “Then . . . then . . .” I paused, not sure whether I should say it. “If that’s not working out, couldn’t you just have another baby?”

  Soon as the suggestion tumbled out, I knew it’d been an awful idea.

  “Lesley, I’m forty-one. Those aren’t betting odds.” She spooled a strand of loose ribbon around her thumb, so tightly it reddened. “And besides, I just want to give . . . give . . .”

  When her voice cracked and her eyes welled up, something broke ope
n, rose up, inside me, too. Not discomfort at her display of emotion, not bristle at her vulnerability, not satisfaction that her despair proved her affection for me, but a stab of pure sorrow, rammed between my ribs, a longing to make things better, pounding in my chest.

  I slid closer on the duvet just as she bowed her head and lowered her face into her palms. Her hands slid up, nails digging into her temples, same way Clare’s had right before the first time I’d kissed her. Her sobs came soft and shuddery with what sounded like embarrassment. She peered at me through her fingers, her eyes darting, her hands quaking.

  I rested my own palms on either side of her face. “It’ll be okay,” I whispered. “Promise. Curran and I, we’ll write letters, tell those dickwads how amazing you are.”

  At that, she trembled even harder, the tears dripping down her cheeks now. “Oh, my naïve-bold dialectical Les. If only it were that easy to—”

  “Shh,” I said, and tipped her face down so I could press my mouth to the top of her dark, silky head, tenderly and carefully as you would a child’s just before bedtime.

  In that moment, I felt the dense fog of my self-absorption begin to lift, the constrained circle of my insular world widen. My breath plummeted into its rightful place. My hands brought hers down, same as Clare’s yet not, love revealing itself in a shape other than a red grommeted dress, speaking from that untapped well of Wise Mind, not quite mother, not quite daughter, but sacred still.

  I squeezed both her hands tight. Caught her bewildered gaze in mine. “My turn to do the believing, okay?”

  14

  Come January, they let me out on an afternoon pass to take my exams. First time on a high street in nine months. Strolling along with a Claymoor Lodge staff member, I stared dazedly at cars and storefronts and cash machines. My scores came back all A’s.

  I wasn’t sure what I would even do with them, but then Francesca sent me a list of universities that had received good marks in helping formerly fostered students adjust, with a sticky note atop it that read: Apply. We’ll work out the finances later.

  In between kickboxing and therapy sessions, I sat at a table in the dining hall, chewing nicotine gum to wean myself off cigarettes while I filled out the forms. Once I’d grown tired of that, I’d ask for supervised kitchen time and work on dinner for the whole unit, in silent paean to Clare: chickpea curry, poached pears, you name it. Taught myself from scratch, the combination of renewed energy and need for distraction transforming me into a relentless autodidact.

  My urges, of course, were still there, the sneaky little bastards: murmuring to me that there was no need for all that hard work, singing the praises of opioid release. At first their lingering presence terrified me, made me convinced of my eternal inability to put things right, but Dr. P. told me that was bollocks. Urges weren’t anything to fear, she said; they were just signs, albeit disturbing ones, that you needed to step back and take stock of what was stressing you out. Could be something as simple as lack of sleep, or something as complicated as wondering whether you could ever let someone love you again, but either way, it all came down not to whether you felt like popping the cap on a blade but to whether you actually dragged it along your skin.

  Eventually, in the Gospel According to Dr. P., if you worked your skills and trained your greyhound well enough, you might even reach a point where you didn’t get urges at all. Nutter nirvana. I wasn’t holding my breath (pun not intended) for that one, but it was still a smashing possibility to imagine.

  • • •

  May burst on the scene with torrential rains, both of droplets and dazzling news:

  Six months spent injury-free.

  Miss and Jascha getting approved to adopt.

  My acceptance at three universities.

  That last one I kept a secret from everyone except Francesca, along with my discharge date. All the way down on the train to London that June, I sat with my bin bag and rucksack and guitar case squashed in the seat next to me, staring at the notices with a huge grin on my face, shuffling them with haughty discernment. Hmm, this one? Or perhaps that? I felt like the posh old lady we’d wound up next to in a restaurant once for my dad’s birthday, who kept crisply sighing about how she “just didn’t know whether to do voluntary work or to travel.” Boo-bloody-hoo, right?

  But now we were like chalk and cheese, that biddy and I, ’cause for the first time in eighteen years I had options. Real ones, not just “Hostel or psych ward, what’ll it be, love?” I’ll take the tattooed waitress and an honors degree with a side of lavender chocolate pudding, thanks.

  I’d gleaned Miss’s address from her care packages, so I decided to surprise her and pop round to her place on Theberton Street. Seriously gorgeous building, set in a row of Georgian terraces with big arched windows and painted flower boxes.

  She answered the door barefoot in a black tank top and denim capris, her hair pulled back with a mismatched array of silver combs.

  “Oh, Les,” she said, her voice rising in flustered pleasure. “You never told me they were letting you down on a weekend pass.”

  “They didn’t,” I said. “I’m out.”

  “Nooo.” Her voice was a sotto voce gasp. “Well, then, get in here, darlin’.”

  Soon as I stepped inside, her sausage dogs rushed towards me, their nails clicking on the hardwood floor, their throats releasing barks deep enough to befit a Rottweiler.

  I set my bin bag and guitar down for them to sniff and pulled the university acceptances from my rucksack. “Ready for another shocker?”

  Miss leaned in to peer at the letterheads. Her brows furrowed for a second, and then she let out a giddy shriek, her hands flying to her mouth in excitement. “Holy shit. You rockstar!”

  It wasn’t until she’d shouted up the staircase to Jascha (“Hey, honey, come see what I found on our doorstep!”) that I realized she owned the whole house. Apparently, she’d been promoted to full-on head at the Hill thanks to Headmistress Fallon’s retirement, and Jascha had just won some prestigious award for a sculpture made of scrap metal, so they’d taken over all three floors—“reverse colonialism,” she explained cheerfully, as we headed down the hall.

  The lounge she ushered me into was delightfully lived-in, even a little messy: stacks of books for end tables, laundry baskets, dog toys, piles of unread newspapers by the fireplace. On a red tapestry-print couch, a squat elderly woman sat before a big flat-screen TV watching a football match in a pink floral housedress, her slippered feet propped on the coffee table, a plate of pastries propped on her ample bosom beneath a necklace of cast-off oxygen tubing.

  “Vera,” Miss said, “this is Lesley.”

  In response, the woman gave an inscrutable mumble, her words obscured by both her full mouth and her thick Russian accent.

  “Lesley,” Miss said, louder this time. “The girl I told you about. My former student.”

  Brushing crumbs from her top, Vera kept her eyes on the screen. “You mean the lunatic?”

  I looked away just as Liverpool scored a goal. Felt my face go hot.

  “For the love of God, Vera,” Miss muttered. “Could you, just once, show some—”

  “No, no,” I said, my voice trembly. “It’s all right. If I’m that much of a joke around here, I’ll go.”

  I skulked towards the doorway, but didn’t get one foot into the corridor before Miss clamped a hand on my shoulder and turned me around to face her.

  “Les, listen,” she said. “My mother-in-law has pulmonary failure and diabetes and dementia. Every word out of her mouth is poor oxygenation and unstable blood sugar and cognitive impairment talking, okay?”

  My mouth crumpled. “Yeah, but it’s—”

  “A horrible welcome back to civilian life, I know.” She rubbed my shoulder gently. “What do you say we escape out to the patio?”

  She opened a pair of French doors, and motioned for me to step down into a small fenced garden and sit beneath a hunter-green umbrella.

  “Sangria?” she said
, gesturing towards the glass pitcher on the round wrought-iron table. “Made with fresh lemons untouched by your misery, I might add.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Let’s.”

  She poured a glass heavy on the fruit for me, and one heavy on the alcohol for herself, then sat down. “Aren’t you warm?”

  I gave the cuff of my long button-down men’s shirt a tug. Felt the pull of its damp underarm seam. “Eh, I’m okay.”

  She took a sharp sip of her drink. Raised one eyebrow. “Which is Lesley-speak for, let me guess, ‘I’m practicing my camouflage ’cause I’m scared as hell the real world will mock me ten times worse than that barmy old Russian bag’?”

  “Goddamn,” I said, tipping my head back, swallowing a mouthful of kiwi. “You ever think about running a psychic hotline, Miss?”

  She chuckled. “You know, Lesley,” she said, “if you’re old enough to get legally buzzed with me, I think we can safely be on a first name basis from here on out.”

  Of course she was right, but I still hesitated, struggling to wrap both my brain and my mouth around the idea. Part of me felt disappointed she hadn’t asked me to call her Mum, but another was relieved she didn’t want me to. I mean, I’d had a shit excuse for a biological mother, but I’d been with her for sixteen years; even with one hell of a surrogate upgrade, you can’t just transfer the name over easily as you’d do for a car registration.

  Didn’t have too much time to reflect on that, though, ’cause right then Jascha came out into the garden, and I jumped up to hug him, and he lifted me off the ground, like I was all of three, and said, “Best doorstep parcel ever, our Leslyochka,” bestowing me with a Russian diminutive clumsy as his wife’s, so tender I thought my tears might well again, so full of delight I knew I was home.

  • • •

  I can’t possibly imagine a better launch into a new life than that summer I spent living with them. Those three months, reviewed retroactively, shimmer with the same golden gleam as the beginning between me and Clare, only with one key difference: Nothing was in danger. Nothing could get taken away.