Forbidden

CHAPTER TWO

Maya

My key jams in the lock again. I curse, then kick the door in my usual manner. The moment I step out of the late afternoon sunshine and into the darkened hallway, I sense that things are already a little wild. Predictably the front room is a tip – crisp packets, book bags, school letters and abandoned homework strewn across the carpet. Kit is eating Cheerios straight from the box, trying to throw the odd one across the room into Willa’s open mouth.

‘Maya, Maya, look what Kit can do!’ Willa calls excitedly to me as I shed my blazer and tie in the doorway. ‘He can get them into my mouth all the way from over there!’

Despite the mess of cereal trampled into the carpet, I can’t help smiling. My little sister is the cutest five-year-old in history. Her dimpled cheeks, flushed pink with exertion, are still gently rounded with baby chubbiness, her face lit with a soft innocence. Since losing her front teeth she has taken to poking the tip of her tongue through the gap when she smiles. Her waist-length hair hangs down her back, straight and fine like gold silk, the colour matched by the tiny studs in her ears. Beneath an overgrown fringe, her large eyes wear a permanently startled look, the colour of deep water. She has exchanged her uniform for a flowery pink summer dress, her current favourite, and is hopping from foot to foot, delighted by her teenage brother’s antics.

I turn to Kit with a grin. ‘Looks like the two of you have been having a very productive afternoon. I hope you remember where we keep the vacuum cleaner.’

Kit responds by throwing a handful of cereal in Willa’s direction. For a moment I think he is just going to ignore me, but then he declares, ‘It’s not a game, it’s target practice. Mum won’t care – she’s out with Lover Boy again tonight, and by the time she makes it home she’ll be too wasted to notice.’

I open my mouth to object to Kit’s choice of words, but Willa is egging him on, and seeing that he is neither sulking nor arguing, I decide to let it pass, and collapse on the couch. My thirteen-year-old brother has changed in recent months: a summer growth spurt has accentuated his already skinny frame, his sandy hair has been cut short to show off the fake diamond stud in his ear and his hazel eyes have hardened. Something has shifted in his manner too. The child is still there but buried beneath an unfamiliar toughness: the change around the eyes, the defiant set of the jaw, the harsh, mirthless laugh all give him an alien, jagged edge. Yet during brief, genuine moments like these, when he is just having fun, the mask slips a little and I see my kid brother again.

‘Is Lochan doing dinner tonight?’ I ask.

‘Obviously.’

‘Dinner . . .’ Willa’s hand flies to her mouth in alarm. ‘Lochie said one last warning.’

‘He was bluffing—’ Kit tries to forestall her, but she is off down the corridor to the kitchen at a gallop, always anxious to please. I sit up on the couch, yawning, and Kit starts flicking cereal at my forehead.

‘Watch it. That’s all we’ve got for the morning and I don’t see you eating it off the floor.’ I stand up. ‘Come on. Let’s go see what Lochan’s cooked up.’

‘Fucking pasta – what else does he ever make?’ Kit tosses the open cereal box onto the armchair, spilling half its contents across the cushions, his good mood evaporating in a heartbeat.

‘Well, perhaps you could start learning how to cook. Then we could all three take turns.’

Kit shoots me a condescending look and stalks ahead of me into the kitchen.

‘Out, Tiffin. I said, get the ball out of the room.’ Lochan has a boiling saucepan in one hand and is trying to manhandle Tiffin through the door with the other.

‘Goal!’ Tiffin yells, shooting the ball under the table. I catch it, toss it into the corridor and grab Tiffin as he tries to dive past me.

‘Help, help, she’s strangling me!’ he yells, miming asphyxiation.

I manoeuvre him onto his chair. ‘Sit!’

At the sight of food he complies, grabbing his knife and fork and beating out a drum roll on the table. Willa laughs and picks up her cutlery to copy.

‘Don’t . . .’ I warn her.

Her smile fades, and for a moment she looks chastened. I feel a pang of guilt. Willa is loving and biddable, whereas Tiffin is always bursting with energy and mischief. As a consequence she is always witnessing her brother get away with murder. Moving quickly round the kitchen, I set out the plates, pour the water, return the cooking ingredients to their respective homes.

‘OK, tuck in, everyone.’ Lochan has dished up. Four plates, one pink Barbie bowl. Pasta with cheese, pasta with cheese and sauce, pasta with sauce but no cheese, broccoli – which neither Kit nor Tiffin will touch – craftily hidden round the sides.

‘Hello, you.’ I catch his sleeve before he heads back to the cooker, and smile. ‘You OK?’

‘I’ve been home two hours and they’ve already gone crazy.’ He shoots me a look of exaggerated despair and I laugh.

‘Mum left already?’

He nods. ‘Did you remember the milk?’

‘Yeah, but we need to do a proper shop.’

‘I’ll go after school tomorrow.’ Lochan spins round in time to catch Tiffin leaping for the door. ‘Oi!’

‘I’m done, I’m done! I’m not hungry any more!’

‘Tiffin, would you just sit down at the table like a normal person and eat your meal?’ Lochan’s voice begins to rise.

‘But Ben and Jamie are only allowed out for another half-hour!’ Tiffin yells in protest, his face scarlet beneath his mop of tow-coloured hair.

‘It’s six-thirty! You’re not going back outside tonight!’

Tiffin throws himself back into his chair in fury, arms folded, knees drawn up. ‘That’s so not fair! I hate you!’

Lochan wisely ignores Tiffin’s antics and instead turns his attention to Willa, who has given up trying to use a fork and is eating the spaghetti with her fingers, tilting back her head and sucking in each strand from the bottom. ‘Look,’ Lochan shows her. ‘You wind it round like this . . .’

‘But it keeps falling off!’

‘Just try a bit at a time.’

‘I can’t,’ she moans. ‘Lochie, cut it up for me?’

‘Willa, you need to learn—’

‘But fingers is easier!’

Kit’s place remains empty as he works his way round the kitchen, opening and slamming cupboard doors.

‘Let me save you some time – the only food we’ve got left is on the table,’ Lochan says, picking up his fork. ‘And I haven’t put any arsenic in it, so it’s unlikely to kill you.’

‘Great, so she’s forgotten to leave us any money for Asda again? Well, of course, it’s all right for her – Lover Boy’s taking her to the Ritz.’

‘His name’s Dave,’ Lochan points out from behind a forkful of food. ‘Calling him that doesn’t make you sound in any way cool.’

Swallowing my mouthful, I manage to catch Lochan’s eye and give a barely perceptible shake of the head. I sense Kit is gearing up for an argument, and Lochan, usually so adept at sidestepping confrontation, looks tired and on edge and seems to be steering blindly for a head-on collision tonight.

Kit slams the last cupboard with such force that everyone jumps. ‘What makes you think I’m trying to sound cool? I’m not the one stuck in an apron because his mother is too busy spreading her legs for—’

Lochan is out of his chair in a flash. I lunge for him and miss. He launches himself at Kit and grabs him by the collar, slamming him up against the fridge. ‘You speak like that in front of the little ones again and I’ll—’

‘You’ll what?’ Kit has his older brother’s hand round his throat, and despite the cocky smirk, I recognize a glimmer of fear in his eyes. Lochan has never threatened him physically before, but in recent months their relationship has deteriorated. Kit has begun to resent Lochan more and more deeply for reasons I struggle to understand. Yet, despite his initial shock, he somehow manages to retain the upper hand with the mocking expression, the look of condescension for the brother nearly five years his senior.

Suddenly Lochan seems to realize what he is doing. He lets go of Kit and springs back, stunned by his own outburst.

Kit straightens up, a slow sneer creeping onto his lips. ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. Gutless. Just like at school.’

He has gone too far. Tiffin is silent, munching slowly, his eyes wary. Willa is gazing anxiously at Lochan, tugging nervously at her ear, her meal forgotten. Lochan is staring at the now empty doorway through which Kit has just departed. He wipes his hands on his jeans and takes a long, steadying breath before turning round to face Tiffin and Willa. ‘Hey, come on, guys, let’s finish up.’ His voice quavers with false cheer.

Tiffin eyes him dubiously. ‘Were you gonna punch him?’

‘No!’ Lochan looks deeply shocked. ‘No, of course not, Tiff. I’d never hurt Kit. I’d never hurt any of you. Jeez!’

Tiffin returns to his meal, unconvinced. Willa says nothing, solemnly sucking each finger clean, silent resentment radiating from her eyes.

Lochan doesn’t return to his seat. Instead he appears at a loss, chewing the corner of his lip, his face working. I lean back in my chair and reach for his arm. ‘He was just trying to wind you up as usual . . .’

He doesn’t respond. Instead, he takes another deep breath before glancing at me and saying, ‘D’you mind finishing this up?’

‘Course not.’

‘Thanks.’ He forces a reassuring smile before leaving the room. Moments later I hear his bedroom door close.

I manage to persuade Tiffin and Willa to finish their food, and then put Lochan’s barely touched plate in the fridge. Kit can have the stale bread on the counter for all I care. I give Willa a bath and force a protesting Tiffin to take a shower. After vacuuming the front room, I decide that an early bedtime would do them no harm and studiously ignore Tiffin’s furious protests about the lingering evening sunlight. As I kiss them in their bunks, Willa puts her arms round my neck and holds me close for a moment.

‘Why does Kit hate Lochie?’ she whispers.

I draw back a little in order to look into her eyes. ‘Sweetheart, Kit doesn’t hate Lochie,’ I say carefully. ‘Kit’s just in a bad mood these days.’

Her deep blue eyes flood with relief. ‘So they love each other really?’

‘Of course they do. And everybody loves you.’ I kiss her again on the forehead. ‘Nighty-night.’

I confiscate Tiffin’s Gameboy and leave the two of them listening to an audio book, then make my way down to the far end of the corridor, where a ladder leads up to the box-sized attic, and shout up at Kit to turn the music down. Last year, after one pitiful complaint after another about having to share a room with his younger siblings, Kit was helped by Lochan to clear the previously unused tiny attic of all the junk left there by former owners. Even though the space is too small to stand up in properly, it is Kit’s lair, the private den in which he spends most of his time when at home, its sloping walls painted black and plastered with rockchicks, the dry, creaking floorboards covered with a Persian rug Lochan unearthed from some charity shop. Cut off from the rest of the house by a steep ladder that Tiffin and Willa have been strictly forbidden to climb, it is the perfect hideaway for someone like Kit. The music fades to a monotonous bass thud as I finally close the door to my room and start my homework.

The house is quiet at last. I hear the audio book come to an end and the air falls silent. My alarm clock reads twenty past eight, and the golden dusk of the Indian summer is fading rapidly. Night is falling, the streetlamps coming on one after the other, casting a funereal light on the exercise book in front of me. I finish off a comprehension exercise and find myself staring at my own reflection in the darkened window. On an impulse I stand up and walk out onto the landing.

My knock is tentative. Had it been me, I’d have probably stalked out of the house, but Lochan isn’t like that. He’s far too mature, far too sensible. Never once in all the nights since Dad left has he stormed out – not even when Tiffin plastered his hair down with treacle then refused to have a bath, or when Willa sobbed for hours on end because someone had given her doll a Mohican.

However, things have been going rapidly downhill lately. Even before his adolescent metamorphosis, Kit was prone to throwing a tantrum whenever Mum went out for the evening – the school counsellor claimed that he blamed himself for Dad leaving, that he still harboured the hope that he might return and therefore felt deeply threatened by anyone trying to take his father’s place. Personally I always suspected it was something far simpler: Kit doesn’t like the little ones getting all the attention for being small and cute and Lochan and I telling everyone what to do, while he’s stuck in noman’s-land, the archetypal middle child with no partner in crime. Now that Kit has gained the necessary respect at school by joining a gang who sneak out of the gates to smoke weed in the local park at lunch time, he bitterly resents the fact that at home he is still considered just one of the children. When Mum’s out, which is increasingly often, Lochan is the one in charge, the way it’s always been; Lochan, the one she dumps on whenever she has to work overtime or fancies a night out with Dave or the girls.

There is no answer to my knock, but when I wander downstairs I find Lochan asleep on the couch in the front room. A thick textbook rests against his chest, its pages splayed, and sheets of scrawled, spidery calculations litter the carpet. Uncurling his fingers from the book, I gather his things into a pile on the coffee table, pull the blanket off the back of the couch, and lay it over him. Then I sit in the armchair and draw up my legs, resting my chin on my knees, watching him sleep beneath the soft orange glow of the streetlamps falling through the curtainless window.

Before there was anything, there was Lochan. When I look back on my life, all sixteen and a half years of it, Lochan was always there. Walking to school by my side, propelling me in a shopping trolley across an empty car park at breakneck speed, coming to my rescue in the playground after I’d caused a class uprising by calling Little Miss Popular ‘stupid’. I still remember him standing there, fists clenched, an unusually fierce look on his face, challenging all the boys to a fight despite being vastly outnumbered. And I suddenly realized that, so long as I had Lochan, nothing and no one could ever harm me. But I was eight then. I’ve grown up since those days. Now I know that Lochan won’t always be here, won’t be able to protect me for ever. Although he’s applying to study at University College, London, and says he will continue to live at home, he could still change his mind and see that this is his chance to escape. Never before have I imagined my life without him – like this house, he is my only point of reference in this difficult existence, this unstable and frightening world. The thought of him leaving home fills me with a terror so strong it takes my breath away. I feel like one of those seagulls covered with oil from a spill, drowning in a black tar of fear.

Asleep, Lochan looks like a boy again – ink-stained fingers, creased grey T-shirt, scuffed jeans and bare feet. People say there is a strong family resemblance – I don’t see it. For a start he is the only one of us with bright green eyes, as clear as cut glass. His shaggy hair is tar-black, covering the nape of his neck and reaching his eyes. His arms are still tanned from summer, and even in the half-light I can make out the faint outline of his biceps. He is beginning to develop an athletic look. He hit puberty late, and for a while even I was taller than he was, something I teased him about mercilessly, calling him ‘my little brother’, back when I thought that kind of thing funny. He took it all on the chin of course, the way he does everything.

But recently things have begun to change. Despite the fact that he is painfully shy, most of the girls in my year fancy him – filling me with a conflicting mixture of annoyance and pride. Yet he is still unable to talk to his peers, rarely smiles outside these walls, and always, always wears the same distant, haunted look, a hint of sadness in his eyes. At home, however, when the little ones aren’t being too difficult or when we are joking together and he feels relaxed, he sometimes displays an entirely different side: a love of mischief, a dimple-cheeked grin, a self-deprecating sense of humour. But even during these brief moments, I feel he is hiding a darker, unhappier part of himself – the part that struggles to cope at school, in the outside world; a world where for some reason he has never felt at peace.

A car backfires across the street, jolting me out of my thoughts. Lochan lets out a small cry and struggles up, disorientated.

‘You fell asleep,’ I inform him with a smile. ‘I think we could market trigonometry as a new treatment for insomnia.’

‘Shit. What time is it?’ He appears panicked for a moment, pushing back the blanket and swinging his feet to the floor, running his fingers through his hair.

‘Just gone nine.’

‘What about—’

‘Tiffin and Willa are fast asleep and Kit’s busy being an angry teenager in his room.’

‘Oh.’ He relaxes slightly, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands and blinking sleepily down at the floor.

‘You look whacked. Perhaps you should forget homework for tonight and go to bed.’

‘No, I’m OK.’ He gestures towards the pile of books on the coffee table. ‘Anyway, gotta finish revising that lot before the test tomorrow.’ He reaches out to switch on the lamp, casting a small circle of light on the floor.

‘You should have told me you had a test. I’d have done dinner!’

‘Well, you did everything else.’ There is an awkward pause. ‘Thanks for – for sorting them out.’

‘No problem.’ I yawn, shifting sideways in the armchair to hang my legs over the armrest, and comb the hair away from my face. ‘Perhaps from now on we should just leave Kit’s meal on a tray at the bottom of the ladder. We can call it room service. Then we might all get a bit of peace.’

The hint of a smile touches his lips, but then he turns away to stare out of the blank window and silence descends.

I take a sharp breath. ‘He was being a little shit tonight, Loch. That stuff about school . . .’

He seems to freeze. I can almost see the muscles tighten beneath his T-shirt as he sits sideways on the couch, an arm slung over the back, one foot on the ground, the other tucked beneath him. ‘I’d better finish this . . .’

I recognize my cue. I want to say something to him, something along the lines of: It’s all an act. Everyone else is pretending anyway. Kit may have surrounded himself with a group of kids who spit in the face of authority, but they’re just as scared as everyone else. They make fun of others and pick on loners just so they can belong. And I’m not much better. I might appear confident and chatty, but I spend most of my time laughing at jokes I don’t find funny, saying things I don’t really mean – because at the end of the day that’s what we’re all trying to do: fit in, one way or another, desperately trying to pretend we’re all the same.

‘Goodnight then. Don’t work too late.’

‘Night, Maya.’ He smiles suddenly, dimples forming at the corners of his mouth. But when I pause in the doorway, looking back at him, he is flicking through a textbook, his teeth chafing at the permanent, painfully red sore beneath his bottom lip.

You think no one else understands, I want to tell him, but you’re wrong. I do. You’re not alone.