‘Would you rather I stayed in the middle?’ She took several unnecessarily bouncy leaps into the centre of the roof and spun around on the spot. ‘Hey! It’s raining, and there’s no one around. This is a perfect opportunity.’ She opened the umbrella with a dramatic flourish, then began twirling around, raising the umbrella high above her head. ‘Have you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain?’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘“What a glorious feeeeeeeling”,’ she sang, deliberately off-key. ‘“I’m haaaappy again.”’
I rolled my eyes, smiling, and turned to look out across Brighton. It was a good view. I could see right out to the pier.
‘How did you even know about this place?’ I asked, turning back around and taking a few more tentative steps across the roof.
‘Brian,’ Suzanne said. She was still moving her feet in some approximation of the steps from Singin’ in the Rain, twirling the umbrella like a fencing foil. ‘He likes to think he’s a photographer, and he sent me a list of links to buildings he wants to photograph when he visits. Properly visits, I mean. Last weekend doesn’t count.’
‘When’s he coming?’ I asked.
Suzanne lifted the umbrella over her shoulder and began sashaying around with it. ‘Not sure – it keeps getting postponed. Hopefully soon though.’
It had finally stopped raining completely, but her performance with the umbrella had left me open to the elements enough that I was pretty drenched. I gathered my wet hair in my hands and scraped it into a temporary ponytail.
‘You know, I don’t really get why you talk about him differently.’
Suzanne stopped mid-spin and looked at me, the umbrella balanced on her shoulder. ‘What do you mean?’ Her face was suddenly anxious. ‘Didn’t you like him?’
‘Well, yeah. But that’s not what I meant. That story you told in the car? About him locking his door? That was horrible. I just think . . . Isn’t he just as bad as your parents? He’s older, and you said your dad never hit him. Couldn’t he have done . . . something?’
Suzanne made a face, then moved closer to me, light on her feet. Her hair was stuck to her face in wet tangles. ‘When I was ten I fell against a radiator after Dad hit me. It was one of those really old ones – you know, the fat round ones? – and it had a jagged edge. I must have fallen weirdly, because it cut my shoulder really badly. Blood everywhere. Brian tried to clean it and patch it up, but it was too deep. He was barely fifteen at the time. He said I had to go to the hospital, that it would need stitches. He tried to get my dad to drive us, but Dad said no. He’d been drinking anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have been safe.’
She drew in a slow breath and glanced up at the sky, closing the umbrella. ‘He tried my mother next. Mum was in one of her moods, when she’d barely get out of bed for weeks at a time, you know? She said no too. But Brian wouldn’t let her off. I don’t know what he said, but eventually she came downstairs and got her keys. She just put a coat on over her pyjamas and got in the car. Brian sat in the back with me, holding a towel to my shoulder and testing me on Beatles lyrics to distract me. When we got to the hospital, Mum said she’d wait in the car—’
‘Wait in the car?’ I interrupted. ‘Are you serious?’
‘She could barely talk to us when she was like that. She’d have been useless. Plus, like I said, she was wearing pyjamas. Anyway, Brian took me into the hospital and talked to the doctors and told me jokes and held my hand when they did the stitches. He said I’d have a battle scar forever, and when I said I hadn’t been in any battles he told me I was going to be a warrior queen one day.’ She paused. ‘He looked after me. He was the one who’d hug me if I was crying. When he got his driving licence he used to take me on drives in the evenings if my dad was going off, and we’d listen to music and it was so safe. When my dad told me I was worthless, Brian was the one who’d tell me it wasn’t true.’ She looked at me, and even though she’d just told me an unbearably sad story, her eyes were clear. ‘That’s why I talk about him differently.’
‘OK,’ I said simply.
But it wasn’t, not really. I still didn’t get it. So he’d hugged her and said she wasn’t worthless. Didn’t those things constitute the bare minimum of what he should have been doing? Her adulation of him seemed to be entirely undeserved. Sure, in comparison to her parents he was a saint. But it wasn’t exactly a high bar.
‘I’m not saying he’s perfect or anything,’ she said quickly, her voice a little defensive, answering a question I hadn’t actually asked. ‘And, I mean, it would have been nice if he’d visited me properly since I moved here. But, you know, he’s got uni and stuff. And, if you’re going by numbers, there are two of my parents, and just one of me, so really it makes more sense for him to go to Reading.’
‘You seemed pretty angry with him,’ I said cautiously. ‘In the car last weekend, I mean.’
‘Oh, that.’ She shrugged dismissively, but she’d looked away so I couldn’t see her expression. ‘I’m sorry you had to see me lose it like that.’