فصل 24

24

LENA

This morning I felt happy. I was lying in bed, covers thrown back. I could feel the heat of the day building and I knew it was going to be beautiful, and I could hear Mum singing. Then I woke up.

On the back of my bedroom door hung the dress I was planning to wear. It’s Mum’s, from Lanvin. She’d never in a million years let me wear it, but today I didn’t think she’d mind. It hadn’t been dry-cleaned since she wore it last, so it still smelled of her. When I put it on, it was like having her skin against mine.

I washed and dried my hair, then tied it back. I usually wear it down, but Mum liked it up. Totes sophis, she’d say in the way she did when she wanted me to roll my eyes at her. I wanted to go into her room to look for her bracelet—I knew it would be in there somewhere—but I couldn’t do it.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to go into her room since she died. The last time I was in there was last Sunday afternoon. I was bored and feeling sad about Katie, so I went into her room to look for some weed. I couldn’t find any in the bedside table, so I started looking through her coat pockets in the wardrobe, because sometimes she keeps stuff in there. I wasn’t expecting her home. When Mum caught me, she didn’t look pissed off, she just looked sort of sad.

“You can’t tell me off,” I said. “I’m looking for shit in your room. So you can’t get pissed off with me. That would make you a total hypocrite.”

“No,” she said, “that would make me a grown-up.”

“Same thing,” I said, and she laughed.

“Yeah, maybe, but the fact is that I’m allowed to smoke weed and drink alcohol and you are not. Why are you looking to get wasted in the middle of a Sunday afternoon anyway? On your own? Kind of sad, isn’t it?” Then she went on, “Why don’t you go for a swim or something? Call a friend?”

I lost it with her, because it sounded like she was saying the kind of thing that Tanya and Ellie and all those bitches say about me—that I’m sad, that I’m a loser, that I’ve got no friends now the only person who ever liked me topped herself. I started yelling, “What fucking friend? I don’t have any, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what happened to my best friend?”

She went really quiet and held her hands up, the way she does—did—when she doesn’t want a fight. But I didn’t back off, I just wouldn’t back off. I was yelling about how she was never around, how she just left me alone all the time, how she was so distant it seemed like she didn’t even want me around at all. She was shaking her head, saying, “That isn’t true, that isn’t true.” She said, “I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted, but there are some things going on that I can’t explain. There’s something I need to do, and I can’t explain how difficult it is.”

I was cold with her. “You don’t need to do anything, Mum. I swear you promised me you’d keep your mouth shut. So you don’t have to do anything. Jesus, haven’t you done enough already?”

“Lenie,” she was saying, “Lenie, please. You don’t know everything. I’m the parent here, you have to trust me.”

I said some shitty things then, about how she’d never been much of a parent, what kind of parent has dope lying around the house and brings men home at night so that I can hear? I told her that if it had been the other way round, if it had been me who’d been in trouble like Katie was, Louise would have known what to do, she’d have been the parent and she’d have done something and she’d have helped. And it was all bullshit, of course, because I was the one who didn’t want Mum to say anything, and she pointed that out and then she said that in any case she had tried to help. And then I just started screaming at her, telling her everything was her fault, that if she went and blabbed to anyone I would leave and never speak to her again. I said it over and over, You’ve done enough damage. The last thing I ever said to her was that it was her fault Katie was dead.