I just rolled my eyes – not keen to point out that I’d been running my own business since I was a teenager. We could get into that later.
*****
Heath
I pulled out the tattered box from under the small bed and then straightened up before sitting down heavily on the mattress, which squeaked and protested under my weight. A few springs dug into my arse, and I thanked God I no longer had to sleep on this torture device.
“I can’t stay in here,” Verity whispered, and I looked up from the box to her. Composed as always, she sat opposite me on her own thin, squeaky nightmare of a mattress. Her hands were clutching our grandmother’s brooch in her lap and her knuckles were white. “This is all I need to take. I thought…” she trailed off and closed her eyes slowly. “I thought coming back here would help, but you were right – we should just leave it in the past where it belongs.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure it’s as easy as that.”
“But you said–”
“I know what I said, but maybe you were right. Maybe we had to come back one last time. We owe it to Granny to bury her son.”
She gave me a small, sad smile, pinned the brooch to her jumper and then stood. “Granny wouldn’t want us back here either.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “And she hated her son as much as we did.”
The floorboards creaked under V’s feet as she left, taking me back thirty years. I brushed the dust off the top of the box and lifted the lid. A smaller, much skinner version of myself looked back at me. I was standing next to Max in our class photo – his face grumpy and mine smiling, same as all our photos. Max arrived at that school feeling out of place, and I arrived just ridiculously grateful to be somewhere I could eat regularly, wear clean clothes and sleep in a bed with a decent mattress. I chucked the box on the floor and lay down on the bed with my feet still on the ground on the side and closed my eyes.
“Heath?”
Yaz’s soft voice filtered into my subconscious, and I frowned. I’d been dreaming that I was back living in the shed, sleeping on that bed with springs digging into my back. I shivered, remembering the cold that had felt like it was burrowing its way into my bones, despite the large number of coats and jumpers Verity and I would pile on top of ourselves. I felt the bed dip next to me and a warm body press against the length on mine. A small hand closed around my fingers that were lying on my chest and gave them a squeeze. It was like a wave of calm and relief crashed over me, just from having her near – as if an unacknowledged pain had lifted.
“You’ve been in here a while,” she said into my chest as I shifted to put my arm around her and pull her into me further. “We were getting a bit worried.”
“I must have drifted off,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I haven’t been getting much sleep lately.”
“I bet.” There was a long pause. I stared up at the cobwebs on the wooden ceiling as the breeze that rattled through the slate blew them this way and that.
“Heath, why are we in a shed?” Yaz asked, and I let out a surprised bark of laughter.
“You lot must all think we’re totally insane. I’m sorry, sometimes Verity and I forget that… We forget other people don’t justknow. That we can’t communicate with the outside world the way we do with each other.”
“I know you do,” Yaz said, acknowledging the weird twinness but not sounding annoyed by it. Other women had been. My last proper girlfriend hadn’t really wanted to be around Verity at all – one of the reasons it didn’t work out, but not the only one. Another reason was pressed to my side, talking softly in my ear. “But we’d like to understand too.”
I sighed, my chest with Yaz rising with my breath coming in. “This is our room.”
“What?” Yaz shifted so that she was up on her side and could see my face. She was frowning in confusion. “Like a den or something?”
I shook my head. “No,notlike a den. Like where we lived.”
A swift intake of breath was the only sign that I’d shocked her – that and the swirling depths of anger highlighting the green flecks in her brown eyes.
“Whatthe fuckdo you mean by that?” she snapped. It was strange, but Yaz’s anger seemed to be abating and quelling my own – it was like a wave of cool water putting out a fire, healing something deep inside me that I hadn’t acknowledged was broken. It was partly because Yaz always seemed so serene, so at peace. ‘Zen’ would be her way of putting it. She let the world do its thing and she did hers. So, her righteous indignation at my neglectful childhood was somehow like a soothing balm to my own.
“I mean, this is where V and I slept. This was our room.”
“What about the goddamn bloodymansionright next door?”
I shrugged. “There was an incident at one of their parties: they had a lot of parties. I… I didn’t think it was safe for us to stay in the house anymore.”
“What kind of incident?” Yaz asked, her tone careful and concerned.
“Some bloke crashed into our room while we were sleeping, stinking of booze and smoke. He grabbed the duvet off Verity’s bed so I hit him over the head with a hockey stick. He backhanded me but I managed somehow to keep hold of that hockey stick and when the bloke came at Verity again, I smashed it at his crotch. He went down then, howling, and we ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs and out of the back door. The party was still going on. We were scared, my eye was swelling shut and we just wanted to hide. But it started to rain so we went into the shed where my father kept his pack of beagles. There was an area for equipment separate to the dogs and we hunkered down in there. The next day I decided that was where we were going to live. We lugged mattresses down there from the house. Nobody noticed. Mum and Dad were passed out.”
“Please, please tell me that your parents called the police the next day,” Yaz’s voice was trembling with rage now. I was starting to regret saying too much about what went on. My childhood memories are a lot to take. I didn’t want to put that on Yaz and I really didn’t want her pity.
I shrugged. “That’s not the way my parents operated.”
