TWENTY-NINE
The sound of tyres crunching on gravel wakes me up. I sit up, squinting in the morning sun, and for a moment I can’t work out where I am. Flashes of last night’s events come back to me: McEwan Hall, empty – Leah on the rooftop – untying Teacake – the long drive north –
Phoning Dad. Telling him to come home, now, and not telling him why.
Key in the lock. The front door opens.
‘Oh, shit.’
I scramble out of the sleeping bag, trip on the hood and fall down again. Allie jerks awake, her hair sticking up in all directions. I run downstairs. Dad’s shoes are lying by the door; Rani’s backpack at the foot of the stairs. The living-room door is ajar. Maybe he hasn’t seen yet. Maybe I still have time to explain, in person, like I wanted to –
Too late.
For a split second, I see it through Dad’s eyes. There is a Being in our house. In our living room. Sitting on the back of our sofa, her wings sharp strokes of pink against our antique-cream walls. A Being eating our KitKats, grinning a chocolatey smile at our dog.
Perry bounds forward, barking in delight; Teacake lifts her up, giggling as she licks at her face. Rani leans against the wall, scratching one leg with the back of her foot, and lifts her hand in a small wave.
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Dad, I was going to –’
He looks around. My lower lip is trembling, and my palms are clammy. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to hate me. I don’t know which is worse.
‘Jaya, what’s going on?’ He steps towards me, then turns to Teacake, then back to me again. ‘I don’t understand. What is this?’
‘This is . . .’ I swallow. ‘This is Teacake.’
Before he has a chance to ask, I tell him the whole story: Teacake’s story, or the part I know of it, at least. For a long moment, afterwards, none of us speak. In the silence, it feels as if the echoes of my sentences swell, becoming more absurd with each passing second.
Teacake is the one to break the silence.
‘Coming up on the show today, we’ll be hearing from Russell Tovey about his latest film and sharing a ratatouille recipe that’s to die for,’ she says. ‘But, first, the weather!’
The colour drains from Dad’s face. He collapses into an armchair, staring at Teacake with unblinking eyes. His head turns from her to me and back again. I can’t tell which of us he’s more surprised by.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
His voice is so fragile. I can’t stand it. He’s my dad. He’s not supposed to sound like this. Like my words have chipped and chiselled at his bones. Like the next sentence I speak could cause him to crumble.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he says again. His fingers clench; for a split second I think he’s about to throttle me, but instead he grabs at his hair. ‘This is all I’ve thought about . . . everything I wanted to . . . why the hell would you keep this from me?’
I don’t know how to answer. Like so many things, it seems ridiculous in hindsight.
‘She thought you’d sell her,’ Rani says. ‘She thought you were going to give her up for research, or to a cult.’
Dad looks at her, his mouth open. ‘You knew about this too?’
Rani’s eyes fill with tears. ‘She wouldn’t let me tell you! I wanted to, but she made me promise!’
‘I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’d . . .’
He pushes himself out of his chair and begins to pace. Every few steps he stops and stares at Teacake with a crazed look in his eyes. She presses herself against the wall, her wings twitching nervously. For a moment, he’s quiet – then he spins around to stare at me.
‘You let me go ahead with it.’ There’s a pink flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘Yesterday. You let me make a fool of myself in front of all those people, when you knew there was no chance of it happening.’
The guilt is aching. Tears blur my vision, but I brush them away. ‘Dad, I’m sorry! I never wanted to lie to you. I had to do what was best for Teacake.’
‘For her?’ The pink has turned to red now; the veins at his temples begin to bulge. ‘What about your family, Jaya? Did you think about what was best for us?’
The last few words come as a shout. Teacake starts and falls backwards off the sofa. Rani grabs her hand and drags her out of the living room and upstairs. The lump in my throat has blocked out my voice. I didn’t expect it to be like this. I’ve been angry at Dad for so long that I thought I’d be able to argue back, to stand my ground – the way Allie and Calum stood up to the manager outside Celeste’s the time I first saw them. Instead, all I feel is a deep, crushing sadness.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I should have told you. I should have . . .’ My head is starting to spin. The living-room walls swirl around me. ‘I saw it happen; I saw her fall. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.’
The floor tilts beneath my feet. I sink to the carpet, my palms over my eyes. After a moment, I feel hands on my shoulders. Dad slides his arms around my back and pulls me into his chest. I don’t know how he knows, but he knows . . . he knows I’m not talking about Teacake any more.
‘Come here, pet,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’
And suddenly, like lightning cracking on ice, something inside me splits and I’m sobbing. Because there’s part of the story that I haven’t told anyone: not Dad, not Rani, not the police. It’s the part of the story that I can only barely admit to myself. And though the words stab at my throat, I force myself to say them now.
‘I ran.’
I saw her fall, and I ran.
All these months later, I still can’t explain it. Logic, rationality, even common decency, they were all swept away by the avalanche thundering through my mind. All I thought was, I’ll go back to the house. I’ll run back, to before this happened, to half past seven that morning, when she walked into my bedroom, when she still had lunch and the weekend and years and years of life ahead of her.
I ran.
It was only a couple of minutes, just a few hundred metres – but I ran.
Somewhere in the glen, I came to my senses: I had to help; I had to get help. I sprinted back to the waterfall, but even then I couldn’t look at her properly. All I remember was the blood blossoming into the water, the jarring yellow streak of her scarf against the bracken. I didn’t have my phone on me to call an ambulance, so I ran towards the nearest village and flagged down a couple of hikers. One of them said something about first aid – I followed her back into the glen, but when she got to the pool the woman turned around and grabbed both of my arms.
‘Don’t look.’ That’s the last thing I remember hearing, until the ambulance came and the police turned up. ‘Don’t look.’
If I’d checked her pulse. If I hadn’t run. If I’d taken my phone with me.
More conditionals.
Now the words come spilling out of me. I hardly notice I’m talking until I reach the point where the memories grow murky; where the hiker told me not to look, and I knew that Mum was gone.
I keep waiting for the moment when Dad realizes what I’ve done and pushes me away. Instead, he hugs me tighter with one arm and holds the other out to Rani, who’s crying in the doorway. She slides underneath, pressing her damp face into my shoulder. We stay there, the three of us, together for the first time in forever.
After a long while, Dad draws back. He turns my head, gently, so I’m looking at him. His eyes are red, and there are tears on his cheeks. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him cry.
‘There’s nothing you could have done.’ His voice is soft and fierce at the same time. ‘The doctors told me. The way she hit her head . . . she died instantly, Jaya. It was over in a second. Even if you’d called right away, darling, it wouldn’t have made a difference. There’s nothing you could have done to change what happened.’