The World Between Us, page 19
off the side of a bell tower.’
My breath gutters and I try to concentrate on how solid the floor feels under my hand.
‘Have you told your dad that things got worse?’
I shake my head.
‘He doesn’t care.
No one cares about kids like us, Alice.’
I look up. To the sky.
‘I care.’
‘I fucked it up,’ I whisper.
‘I thought I could protect him, but
I’m just as bad as Dad.’
He’s not listening to me. And I don’t know how many words I have left.
‘If you told him – your dad – if you told him the truth, he could help you. And Fran. Charlie. My mum. If you told them, they could help.’
I failed.
I failed.
I failed.
He pinches his eyes and I see the same worry lines on his face that I see on mine in the mirror, always hiding what we are. What we’re really feeling. Always pretending that we’re stronger than we are, when sometimes – sometimes – we perhaps aren’t.
And it’s okay, isn’t it? It’s okay to show someone that you’re disappearing. Especially if that helps them find their own lines.
‘Rowan. Rowan – I’m not … I’m not well.’
I rub my face.
‘Ask your parents to help you, Alice.’
And the fog finally catches up. It licks my toes like flames.
‘I do.’ I gasp. ‘Not with words, but I ask them. I ask them to – to get me out of bed in the morning. I ask them to feed me. Worry for me. Keep me from falling over in the middle of my bedroom and pick me up whenever I do.’
I turn back.
‘What are you –?’
But then I see her.
See her in a way that feels like
waking up.
Alice.
Her twig-thin arms.
Her ghost-white face.
Her eyes leaking light.
But still somehow smiling.
‘What – Alice?’
The fog swirls higher and the light dips lower and Rowan reaches out and grabs me. Grabs me by the hand.
And our skin. Our skin together. Him and me. Both. It’s one of many impossible things a girl who is bound but boundless can have.
I look at his eyes. Dark marbles.
I can’t clutch his hand back, but I focus on how it feels to have him
reach out through the world between us
and hold me.
‘I’m ill, Rowan,’ I whisper.
Alice. Alice. Alice.
I stumble closer to her.
‘Alice –’
Why does she look like she’s
fading away?
His skin feels impossibly cold.
‘No more hiding. No more lies.’
I tilt my head. To the sky. Feel the last dregs of sun.
Then I look at him. The crease above his eyes. If I had spoons, I would thumb-iron that away.
‘It’s time to let people see, Rowan.’
Oh shit.
Oh shit.
She’s sinking away
into depths I
can’t reach.
I reach out,
try to grab her back.
‘Alice?
Alice!’
Hello.
That’s my name.
Or perhaps it was.
No matter.
I came.
I climbed.
And I told him.
I just hope.
I just hope.
This time.
He listened.
‘H-help!’
72
And now
I am
lost.
73
Alice
Beep.
Hands.
Beep.
Whispers.
Beep.
Words.
Beep.
‘Alice?’
Beep.
Me.
Beep.
ME.
Beep.
I am here.
Beep.
In between these heartbeats.
Beep.
I want to tell them.
Beep.
I want to show them.
Beep.
I am HERE.
Beep.
But the beeps.
Beep.
For now.
Beep.
Are doing that for me.
74
Alice
Days and days and days of endless, burning fog.
And then. In patches. It clears.
Wires.
Crossing and cartwheeling. Down from a bag of clear liquid and needling into my arm.
Eyes.
Not ones I know, but crinkled kindly and staring at me from over a green paper mask. And then a mask of my own is hooked on to my face. One that smells of plastic and hisses with sea breeze.
It will make me better. It will stop some of the pain.
Hands.
Mum’s hands. Holding mine. And Dad’s footsteps pacing the floor.
‘She’s never been this bad before, Sophia.’
Mum’s eyes see mine through the fog.
‘She’s on her way back.’
I am.
75
Alice
At first I want to ask how long.
How long have I been in hospital? With the spoon-destroying strip lights and the incessant beeping and the questions, questions.
And then I want to ask about Rowan.
Did he hear me?
Did he reach out and ask for help?
And then I want to ask what happened.
What happened when he saw who I was?
Did he at least look back when he walked away?
But I don’t have the spoons for words. I barely have enough to form any thoughts at all.
But I have enough to cartwheel patterns on my eyelids as I try to stay perfectly still and let my body fight whatever part of the Illness has made it fall so spectacularly backwards.
I let the light splatter into giant paintings of krakens. Of mermaids. Of a family of humpback whales, back together again.
In my mind, I strap myself to the arms of paintbrushes and I create whole worlds of light. And I will the ink to seep down through my bones, into my veins and deep into my cells. To paint in something new. Something working. Something beautiful.
And I prepare myself. Because I know that when my body is back again, I have a whole new world to step into. And for that I’m going to need something special.
Not my streamers. Not Rowan. Not even Mum and Dad.
I’m going to need Alice. Because, when it comes to capital-L Living, she’s all I’ve got.
76
Alice
It almost seems impossible, but I’ve made a new friend.
I didn’t know her name for a few days. Just the kind crinkle of her eyes. The wink she gave me when she was saying something I couldn’t quite understand, but which made me feel that, whatever it was, it was something nice. But then I caught a glimpse of her nametag – three letters that it took spoons and spoons to read, but that eventually detangled themselves in my head and became a word.
May.
May wears blue scrubs and a gold necklace round her neck with a coin on it. She wears glitter on her eyelids, and when she leans over to check the beeping by my bed she smells like the inside of a dressing room on the set of a Hollywood film.
I can’t tell May my name because I can’t make my lips move. But she seems to know it anyway and whispers secrets in my ear like we’re old friends.
Sometimes she tells jokes. And hours after she’s gone, when the lights have been turned low and I can gather the spoons to wake up, the jokes tumble into pictures and I laugh.
And somehow, days and days and days later, May is there suddenly, whispering to me about Mum and Dad, and the words sink in like quicksand.
‘Don’t tell your dad, Alice, but your mum messed with him when he was asleep just now.’
Words. Words I understand. And I can slide my eyes to the left in time to see Dad stretching – his own glitter eyeshadow brightening his face. And somewhere inside I laugh.
May sees. And her face cracks into a smile that shows beautiful gapped teeth.
‘There you are,’ she says. ‘I see you.’
77
Alice
I’m being discharged.
Away from the impossibly bright lights, and the beeping, and the people who became my friends. Away from the questions we can’t answer, and they can’t, either.
Mum isn’t crying this time, though. And the bags they have wired into my veins have been drip-feeding spoons and gluing the lines back together between Me and my body.
And as I’m wheeled out with my sunglasses on and my earplugs in, I hunt for May in the faces wishing me luck, and find her hand.
‘You stay away this time, you hear me?’ she says.
‘I’ll try,’ I promise.
I grip her hand as tightly as I can before letting her float away, wishing on her like she’s a shooting star. I don’t ever want to come back.
I’m wheeled down long corridors with art on the walls so colourful I can’t look at it. But the colours stay with me as I’m led outside and into the car. As the silent headphones go back round my ears. And I take my last look at the world – at Mum and Dad swirling with colours – as I know the car will take the spoons that I’ve slowly built up enough for them to let me go home. But I’ll get them back again. Slowly – they’ll come back.
The car roars.
Colour stretches.
Then the smell of home.
A whirlwind fish spinning in his tank.
The sigh of a duvet in a puff of chalk.
Lights off. World dulls. But the colours stay with me.
I close my eyes and swim.
78
Alice
I’m dreaming and I’m swimming.
The water is warm and clear, like a bath. At the bottom, coral twists out from the jagged seabed and reaches its fingers towards me. But I’m too far away for it to touch me.
And I barrel-roll on to my back and look up, to where the sunlight is shattering into beams and where, up on the surface, there are legs paddling.
Cecelia. Mum. Dad.
Rowan.
I’m too far down to reach them. But I don’t spin or kick to get to them this time, because I’m clinging to every spoon I have. And I wait for my last breath to gutter, and my lungs scream at me to kick kick kick, but I don’t. I steady myself. And I take a lungful of water instead.
And the water doesn’t taste like drowning. My lungs stop screaming and my body sighs and I feel the oxygen flowing through me as if my bones are breathing, too.
I reach up to my neck and there, cut into the sides, are gills. Gills to breathe the in-between.
And now – here – it’s peaceful. It’s warm. I can hear the chattering of surface sounds above and the tapping of hidden things below. And I don’t belong in either place.
But I get the feeling that here – in the middle – I’m not alone.
‘Alice?’
I open my eyes and it’s Dad. He’s swum down to see me.
‘Hi,’ I say, and I duck and dive, because I said a word. Even after the car took them from me again, I said a word out loud.
Dad’s smile twinkles. ‘Welcome back, kiddo.’
He swims away again and leaves a curious sight behind him. It almost seems like grains of my dream have been kicked up into reality, and my bedroom has been swept away into an ocean of blues.
I blink. But it doesn’t shift. And trying to understand feels like trying to turn over an elephant in my mind.
Working out what’s going on with the real world = 1 spoon
I let it trickle in slowly.
The swirling colour frosted over my walls.
The forest of deep-green coral gathered round Manta’s tank and housing flashing starfish, shoals of yellow-tipped fish and the dead-eyed mouth of an eel lying in wait.
And, above me, a whole tunnel of water bursting round a light bulb and rippling as a gigantic manta ray comes sweeping over my bed.
My walls. My bedroom walls. They’ve been washed away. Taken by a wave. Replaced with an entire ocean of everything.
I reach out.
Taking Dad’s hand = 1 spoon
‘I’ve got to hand it to him. He might be a teenage delinquent, but he sure can paint.’
Rowan.
His name dips and dives and pulls at a thread of something that is attached to my ribs, my ears, the very tips of my toes. And I want to grab it and push it away. And it’s painful and wonderful. And it’s real and so entirely like a dream.
He has painted my bedroom walls. Every single bit of them.
He has dissolved them into our tunnel under the sea, and I want to lie on the floor with him and look up at the world and take his hand and –
Be.
I look around for him.
‘When you’re better, kiddo. He wants to see you, too.’
He wants to see me. Even after he saw me for who I was, he wants to see me.
And I wonder if anything else could ever feel quite as much like capital-L Living.
79
Alice
My spoons are back.
Perhaps not all-the-way back yet, but enough for me to sit up between Mum, Dad and Cecelia as we watch the recording of her on the local news the other week.
A reporter in a smart suit stands outside the school gates – in the same place I stood just a short while ago – and I wonder if he can see the ghost of my footprints.
Cecelia groans when she flashes on the screen, staring straight into the camera like it’s a high-speed train hurtling towards her.
‘Oh God, this is mortifying.’
‘Shhh-shush! You’re speaking over the best bit.’ Dad turns the volume up loud.
‘I’m joined now by the young rescuer, Cecelia Adebayo. Cecelia – what was going through your mind when you climbed that bell tower?’
The on-screen Cecelia’s eyes bulge as the camera zooms in and there’s a terrifying silence for a moment, which the real Cecelia wails through and tries to snatch the remote away from Dad.
‘Turn – it – off!’
‘Um – I dunno really. Just that it was quite high.’
‘“Just that it was quite high”,’ Mum and Dad mock before falling over laughing.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you lost for words.’
‘It’s the camera, okay! It – it threw me.’
Mum and Dad continue to laugh at her, but over it I’m trying to listen. Because now, standing on-screen, is Jonah. Yellow-haired and waving into the camera like he’s seeing me behind it again. And he’s fine. He’s fine.
‘Shhh!’ I say, and the others fall quiet. ‘Let’s listen.’
The reporter bends down to him. ‘Jonah, what were you doing all the way up the tower in the first place?’
He grins and there’s that missing tooth. ‘I wanted to see the flowers.’
‘There are flowers all the way up there?’ the reporter asks.
Jonah shrugs. ‘My brother can make flowers out of nowhere, and big octopuses, too. He can do anything.’
The shot cuts to Rowan waving awkwardly at the camera while speaking to someone on the phone and my heart leaps. I want to pause it. Spend time looking at his long fingers and slanted smile. To look properly at his clothes – the same ones he was wearing when I saw him in real, technicolour life – like looking into a parallel universe where life carried on after mine stopped for a while – where my best friend was interviewed live on TV, and Rowan listened to me and walked back.
I can feel Cecelia’s eyes on me, waiting to crack a joke, though, so I let the moment pass.
The reporter is back to Jonah now. ‘And are you pleased you were rescued?’
He sighs, like he’s really trying to think about it. ‘I could have got down on my own probably, because I got up there all by myself. But it was nice having Cecelia there, too – she makes me laugh.’
On the screen, Jonah holds Cecelia’s hand and Cecelia smiles in a strange, panicky way that shows her teeth.
This time, she manages to wrestle the remote away from Dad.
‘Aaaaand delete. Honestly – that kid. Risked my neck going up to save him and the best thing he can say is that I cracked a couple of jokes up there.’
‘Bet he couldn’t get down fast enough,’ Mum says, sliding away from Cecelia’s hands as she tries to flick her.
But the reporter knows she did more than that, and we all do, too. So, when Mum and Dad leave, I use a spoon to hug her.
Hugging a hero = 1 spoon
‘Thank you for saving him,’ I say.
She pats my arm. ‘You would’ve done the same if you could.’
‘Have things got better now? With the others at school?’
She shrugs. ‘I guess. A few people want to join the climbing club now, so at least it won’t just be me and the creepy gym teacher. And Rowan’s mates – Fran and Charlie – they’ve started inviting me to stuff, too, which beats eating on my own all the time. They’re all right, actually. A bit gross, but all right.’ She slides a look at me and hugs me tighter. ‘None of them are a patch on you, though. And – by all accounts – you were off being your own hero that day, anyway.’
I bite my lip. I’ve been thinking about it and I’m wondering if that’s true. Because however good it was to be there when Rowan needed me, it was at the expense of so much more. Dad. Mum. And almost, nearly, me. Perhaps that’s not entirely what being a hero is.
I turn to look at her. She has green in her hair now and she matches my walls. ‘Do you know? Do you know if it worked? That he’s okay?’
Cecelia grabs her phone and passes it to me. ‘How about you let him tell you that himself?’
