Before I Die aka Now is Good

Twenty-three

Cal comes trotting up from the bottom of the dark garden, his hand outstretched. ‘Next,’ he says.

Mum opens the box of fireworks on her lap. She looks as if she’s choosing a chocolate, delicately picking one out, then reading the label before passing it over.

‘Enchanted Garden,’ she tells him.

He rushes back to Dad with it. The tops of his wellies slap against each other as he runs. Moonlight filters through the apple tree and splashes the grass.

Mum and me have brought chairs from the kitchen and we’re sitting together by the back door. It’s cold. Our breath like smoke. Now winter is here, the earth smells wet, as if life is hunkering down, things crouching low, preserving energy.

Mum says, ‘Do you know how truly horrible it is when you go off and don’t tell anyone where you are?’

Since she’s the great disappearing expert of all time, I laugh at that. She looks surprised, obviously doesn’t get the irony. ‘Dad says you slept for two days solid when you got back.’

‘I was tired.’

‘He was terrified.’

‘Were you?’

‘We both were.’

‘Enchanted Garden!’ Dad announces.

There’s a sudden crackle, and flowers made of light bloom into the air, expand, then sink and fade across the grass.

‘Ahhh,’ Mum says. ‘That was lovely.’

‘That was boring,’ Cal cries as he comes galloping back to us.

Mum opens the box again. ‘How about a rocket? Would a rocket be any better?’

‘A rocket would be excellent!’ Cal runs round the garden to celebrate before handing it over to Dad. Together they push the stick into the ground. I think of the bird, of Cal’s rabbit. Of all the creatures that have died in our garden, their skeletons jostling together under the earth.

‘Why the seaside?’ Mum asks.

‘I just fancied it.’

‘Why Dad’s car?’

I shrug. ‘Driving was on my list.’

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you can’t go around doing just what you like. You have to think about the people who love you.’

‘Who?’

‘The people who love you.’

‘Loud one,’ Dad says. ‘Hands over ears, ladies.’

The rocket launches with a single boom, so loud its energy expands inside me. Sound waves break in my blood. My brain feels tidal.

Mum’s never said she loves me. Not ever. I don’t think she ever will. It would be too obvious now, too full of pity. It would embarrass both of us. Sometimes I wonder at the quiet things that must have passed between us before I was born, when I was curled small and dark inside her. But I don’t wonder very often.

She shifts uncomfortably on her chair. ‘Tessa, are you planning on killing anyone?’ She sounds casual, but I think she might mean it.

‘Of course not!’

‘Good.’ She looks genuinely relieved. ‘So what’s next on your list then?’

I’m surprised. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I really do.’

‘OK. Fame’s next.’

She shakes her head in dismay, but Cal, who has turned up for the next firework, thinks it’s hilarious. ‘See how many drinking straws you can stuff in your mouth,’ he says. ‘The world record’s two hundred and fifty-eight.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I tell him.

‘Or you could get tattooed all over your body like a leopard. Or we could push you up the motorway in your bed.’

Mum regards him thoughtfully. ‘Twenty-one-shot Cascade,’ she says.

We count them. They shoot up with a soft phut, burst into clusters of stars, then drift slowly down. I wonder if the grass will be stained sulphur-yellow, vermilion, aquamarine by morning.

A comet next, to appease Cal’s desire for action. Dad lights it and it whizzes up above the roof, trailing a tail of glitter.

Mum bought smoke bombs. They cost £3.50 each and Cal’s seriously impressed. He shouts the price to Dad.

‘More money than sense,’ Dad yells back.

Mum shoves two fingers up at him and he laughs so warmly that she shivers.

‘I got two for the price of one,’ she tells me. ‘That’s one advantage of you being ill and us having firework night in December.’

The bombs spray the garden with green smoke. Loads of it. It’s as if goblins are about to arrive. Cal and Dad come running from the bottom of the garden, laughing and spluttering.

‘That’s a ridiculous amount of smoke!’ Dad cries. ‘It’s like being in Beirut!’

Mum smiles, passes him a Catherine wheel. ‘Do this one next. It’s my favourite.’

He gets a hammer, and she stands up and holds the fence post still while he bangs the nail in. They’re laughing together.

‘Don’t hit my fingers,’ she says, and she nudges him with her elbow.

‘I will if you do that!’

Cal sits in Mum’s seat and rips open a packet of sparklers. ‘I bet I’m famous before you,’ he tells me.

‘I bet you’re not.’

‘I’m going to be the youngest person ever to join the Magic Circle.’

‘Don’t you have to be invited?’

‘They will invite me! I’ve got talent. What can you do? You can’t even sing.’

‘Hey!’ Dad says. ‘What’s this?’

Mum sighs. ‘Both our children want to be famous.’

‘Do they?’

‘Fame’s next on Tessa’s list.’

I can tell from Dad’s face that he wasn’t expecting this. He turns to me, the hammer limp at his side. ‘Fame?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

‘I thought you’d finished with the list.’

‘No.’

‘I thought after the car, after all that’s happened…’

‘No, Dad, it’s not finished.’

I used to believe that Dad could do anything, save me from anything. But he can’t, he’s just a man. Mum puts her arm around him and he leans in to her.

I stare at them. My mother. My father. His face is in shadow, the edges of her hair are tipped with light. I keep really still. Cal, next to me, keeps really still too.

‘Wow!’ he whispers.

It hurts more than I could ever have imagined.

In the kitchen, I swill my mouth out with water at the sink and spit it out. My spit looks slimy, is pulled so slowly towards the plug-hole that I have to chase it down with more water from the tap. The sink is cold against my skin.

I turn off the light and watch my family through the window. They stand together on the lawn, sorting through the last of the fireworks. Dad holds each one up and shines the torch at it. They choose one, shut the box, and all three of them walk away down the garden.

Perhaps I’m dead. Perhaps this is all it will be. The living will carry on in their world – touching, walking. And I’ll continue in this empty world, tapping soundlessly on the glass between us.

I go out of the front door, shut it behind me and sit on the step. The undergrowth rustles, as if some night creature is trying to hide itself from me, but I don’t freak out, don’t even move. As my eyes adjust, I can see the fence and the bushes that line it. I can see the street beyond the gate quite clearly, lamplight splashing across the pavement, slanting across other people’s cars, reflected back from other people’s blank windows.

I can smell onions. Kebabs. If my life was different, I’d be out with Zoey. We’d have chips. We’d be standing on some street corner, licking salty fingers, waiting for action. But instead, I’m here. Dead on the doorstep.

I hear Adam before I see him, the guttural roar of his bike. As he gets closer, the noise vibrates the air, so that the trees seem to dance. He stops outside his gate, switches off the engine and turns off the lights. Silence and darkness descend again as he unclips his helmet, threads it through the handlebars and pushes the bike up the drive.

I mostly believe in chaos. If wishes came true, my bones wouldn’t ache as if all the space inside them is used up. There wouldn’t be a mist in front of my eyes that I can’t brush away.

But watching Adam walk up the path feels like a choice. The universe might be random, but I can make something different happen.

I step over the low wall that separates our front gardens. He’s locking the bike to the gate at the side of his house. He doesn’t see me. I walk up behind him. I feel very powerful and certain.

‘Adam?’

He turns round, startled. ‘Shit! I thought you were a ghost!’ There’s a cold-washed smell to him, as if he’s an animal come out of the night. I take a step closer.

‘What are you doing?’ he says.

‘We said we’d be friends.’

He looks confused. ‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t want to be.’

There’s space between us, and in that space there’s darkness. I take another step, so close that we share a breath. The same one. In and out.

‘Tessa,’ he says. I know it’s a warning, but I don’t care.

‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’

‘It’ll hurt,’ he says.

‘It already hurts.’

He nods very slowly. And it’s like there’s a hole in time, as if everything stops and this one minute, where we look at each other so close, is spread out between us. As he leans towards me, I feel a strange warmth filtering through me. I forget that my brain is full of every sad face at every window I’ve ever passed. As he leans closer, I feel only the warmth of his breath on my skin. We kiss very gently. Hardly at all, like we’re not sure. Our lips are the only place where we touch.

We stand back and look at each other. What words are there for the look that passes from me to him and back again? Around us all the night things gather and stare. The lost things found again.

‘Shit, Tess!’

‘It’s all right,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t break.’

And to prove it, I push him back against the wall of his house and keep him there. And this time it’s not about tenderness. My tongue is in his mouth, searching, meeting his. His arms wrap me warm. His hand is on the back of my neck. I melt there. My hand slides down his back. I press myself closer, but it’s not close enough. I want to climb inside him. Live in him. Be him. It’s all tongue and longing. I lick him, take small bites on the edges of his lips.

I never realized I was this hungry.

He pulls away. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Shit!’ And he runs his hand through his hair; it gleams wet, animal dark. The streetlights blaze in his eyes. ‘What’s happening to us?’

‘I want you,’ I tell him.

My heart’s thumping. I feel absolutely alive.