One night when I got home I did an internet search on teenagers’ problems, trying to work out whether I could help to repair the damage of the weekend. But it had quite a lot on hormonal breakouts and nothing on what to do when you had introduced a sixteen-year-old you had just met to her dead quadriplegic father’s surviving family. At half past ten I gave up, gazed around at the bedroom in which half my clothes were still stored in boxes, promised myself that this would be the week I did something about it, and then, having reassured myself that I totally would, fell asleep.
I was woken at half past two in the morning by the sound of someone trying to force my front door. I stumbled out of bed, grabbed a mop, then put my eye to the spy-hole, my heart thumping. ‘I’m calling the police!’ I yelled. ‘What do you want?’
‘It’s Lily. Duh.’ She fell through the door as I opened it, half laughing, reeking of cigarettes, her mascara smeared around her eyes.
I wrapped my dressing-gown around myself, and locked the door behind her. ‘Jesus, Lily. It’s the middle of the night.’
‘Do you want to go dancing? I thought we could go dancing. I love dancing. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I do like dancing but that’s not why I’m here. Mum wouldn’t let me in. They’ve changed the locks. Can you believe it?’
I was tempted to answer that, with my alarm clock set for six a.m., funnily enough, I could.
Lily bumped heavily against the wall. ‘She wouldn’t even open the stupid door. Just shouted through the letterbox at me. Like I was some kind of … vagrant. So … I thought I’d stay here. Or we could go dancing …’ She swayed past me and headed for the music system, where she turned up the sound to a deafening level. I raced towards it to turn it down, but she grabbed my hand. ‘Let’s dance, Louisa! You need to bust some moves! You’re so sad all the time! Cut loose! C’mon!’
I wrenched my hand away, and rushed to the volume button, just in time for the first thumps of outrage to land from downstairs. When I turned, Lily had disappeared into the spare room, where she teetered and finally collapsed, face down, on the camp bed.
‘Oh. My. God. This bed is soooooo rubbish.’
‘Lily? You can’t just come in here and – Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘Just for a minute,’ came the muffled answer. ‘Literally a stopover. And then I’m going dancing. We’re going dancing.’
‘Lily. I have work tomorrow morning.’
‘I love you, Louisa. Did I tell you that? I really do love you. You’re the only one who …’
‘You can’t just collapse here like –’
‘Mmph … disco nap …’
She didn’t move.
I touched her shoulder. ‘Lily … Lily?’
She let out a small snore.
I sighed, waited a few minutes, then carefully removed her tatty pumps, and the contents of her pocket (cigarettes, mobile phone, a crumpled fiver), which I took into my room. I propped her on her side in the recovery position, and finally, wide awake at three a.m., knowing I would probably not sleep for fear she would choke, sat on the chair, to watch her.
Lily’s face was peaceful. The wary scowl and the manic, overeager smile had stilled into something unearthly and beautiful, her hair fanned around her shoulders. Maddening as her behaviour was, I couldn’t be angry. I kept recalling the hurt on her face that Sunday. Lily was my polar opposite. She didn’t nurse a hurt, or contain it. She lashed out, got drunk, did God-knew-what to try to forget. She was more like her father than I’d thought.
What would you have made of this, Will? I asked him silently.
But, just as I had struggled to help him, I didn’t know what to do for her. I didn’t know how to make it better.
I thought of my sister’s words: You won’t be able to cope, you know. And just for a few still, pre-dawn moments, I hated her for being right.
We developed a routine of sorts, in which Lily would turn up to see me every few days. I was never certain which Lily I would find at my door: manically cheerful Lily, demanding that we go out and eat at this restaurant or look at the totally gorgeous cat outside on the wall downstairs, or dance in the living room to some band she’d just discovered; or subdued, wary Lily, who would nod a silent greeting on her way in, then lie on my sofa and watch television. Sometimes she would ask random questions about Will – what programmes did he like? (He barely watched television; he preferred films.) Did he have a favourite fruit? (Seedless grapes. Red ones.) When was the last time I’d seen him laugh? (He didn’t laugh much. But his smile … I could picture it now, a rare flash of even white teeth, his eyes crinkling.) I was never sure whether she found my answers satisfactory.
And then, every ten days or so, there was drunk Lily, or worse (I was never sure), who would hammer on my door in the small hours, ignoring my protests about time and lost sleep, stumble past me with mascara-smudged cheeks and missing shoes and pass out on the little camp bed, refusing to wake when I left in the morning.