Non Pratt - Trouble

I say nothing.

“They feel pretty bad about it.”

Still have nothing to say.

“Talk to me, Aaron.” He pauses. “Please.”

I turn and look at him. He’s staring at me, eyes a little bleary from the smoke and the alcohol and yesterday’s four-hour drive.

“There’s nothing to say.” I watch him watching me, looking for signs of mental instability. “I think they’re unwise to talk about me whilst I’m in the house. And rude. But then, y’know, your family…”

I crack a smile to show I’m joking but Dad’s echo of the same is weak. Our timing’s all wrong these days.

“Come back to us, son.”

I stare at the ground between my feet and focus on the fuzz of frost on the blades of grass.

“It’s hard. I’m trying.”

But I wonder whether I really am.

Dad puts his arm around me, pressing his face into my hair. “I just wish I knew what was going on in here.”

“Guilt, Dad.”

There’s a silence between us. This is old ground.

“We’re all guilty of something,” he says and I know he’s thinking that there was something he could have done to help. That my parents’ love is so strong they’d rather see a flaw in their parenting than a flaw in their son is overwhelming.

It’s too much to be forgiven when all you want is to be blamed.

“I can’t tell you who the father is” sounds a lot like “I don’t know who the father is” to an already hysterical parent.

“How many have there been?” The look that crosses my mother’s face shames me more than anything I’ve ever done with a boy — and yet it’s still easier to let her think I’ve been knocked up by a nameless random than tell her the truth. I think that would be one truth too many after learning that not only am I over three months pregnant, but that I turned to Gran for help.

Robert tells me to leave the room. We will talk in the morning. As I turn to shut the door, I see Mum burrow into his big broad shoulder, pressing her face into the cheesey Christmas jumper he wears every year. I watch as her shoulders shake and he wraps his arms around her, protecting her from the hurt I’ve caused.

I shut the door and slide down the other side. Mum has Robert. I have no one.

And it’s all my fault.

Sleep is dangerous country. You relinquish control of body and mind, hand over everything and leave yourself vulnerable for those unwaking hours.

I never used to have problems sleeping. Not before. Now sleep and I are uncomfortable bed companions, with me lying frigid beneath the sheets waiting to feel its arms slip around me, then giving in to the inevitable. Sleep cannot be trusted. Sometimes it takes you away for what feels like a lifetime to deposit you awake and alert mere minutes after it claimed you. Sometimes it snatches seconds and gives hours in return. And when you slip behind that black curtain there’s no telling what waits on the other side…

Sometimes I’m living my dreams, sometimes I’m aware that I’m dreaming, but there’s a special kind of dream that is a living nightmare. I know what’s coming, I’m aware of what I’m being dragged inexorably towards, but I’m also living it, like it’s something I’ve never experienced before, so I get to feel the horror and the dread every time, as if it’s the first. How does my brain allow this to happen? What stupid short circuit has been set up so that I get to experience apprehension and surprise at the same time?

And why is it that this dream can strike at any time, turning innocuous fun, or satisfying sexy time, or even calming blankness into something that erases every bit of good feeling I’ve ever had and forces me to face the worst of myself?

It starts with the rain.

In my dreams I get 3D, surround sound, smell-o-vision… I also get wet. IMAX has nothing on me.

First I feel the drops splatting one by one. But it’s just me — no one else around me is getting wet. Every time I ask them, I point to the sky and to the wet drops on my arms — Look, I’m wet — but after I’ve shown a couple of people I start to notice that it’s not water that’s falling on me. It’s blood.

That’s usually when the sky darkens and the rain starts to fall properly. Whoever else is in the dream starts to melt away, they get lost in the torrents of rain falling from the sky, because it’s rainwater falling from the sky — it only turns to blood when it lands on me. I’m getting wet, and cold and scared. Where is everyone?

Then I hear a voice calling me.

Ty!

This has been confusing me recently, because I’m getting used to being called Aaron now but, still, my dream self recognizes my name and starts to follow the sound. It’s not easy, the rain is loud and there’s thunder in the air.

Ty!

Only when I’m already walking towards the silhouette of the person calling my name do I start to wonder who it is, but I never guess. I both know, and don’t know.

It’s Chris.

I point to my bloodstained clothes. “It’s raining blood, dude.”

“It’s not raining,” he says. “It’s me.”

There’s silence. Everything stops: the rain, the thunder. A perfect moment of stillness.

Then he’s ripped open from the inside out, blood spraying over me and there’s this noise. A whumph and a crunch and a sound that I only ever heard once, but I’ve listened to again and again and again…

And I’m listening to it now, watching him fall to the floor in front of me as I stand there in the rain, covered in blood — his blood — watching my best friend hit the floor and he’s screaming in pain and writhing around and I’m sobbing but there’s nothing I can do because I can’t move towards him — every time I try I’m moving further away.

But no matter how far away I get, I can hear him screaming and sobbing as if he’s right there inside my own head.

Because he is. That screaming and sobbing? That’s me.

“Ivy.”

“Paula.”

I give Gran a kiss on the cheek and go through to her kitchen to put the kettle on, passing the tiny fake Christmas tree in the corner. There are some presents under it waiting for me to share the fun in opening them. There’s one for me from Dad. At least I hope there is — there wasn’t one under our tree.

Something tells me there won’t be any present-opening today or, if there is, it won’t be joyful.

I take the teapot over to the table in Gran’s dining area where Mum and Gran are sitting awkwardly upright like two people on a stage, set to start a performance they haven’t rehearsed properly. There are two more chairs: one near Gran; one near Mum. I sit on the bed.

“You know why I’m here,” my mum says.

Gran nods and gives me a sad look. I called her this morning to tell her what happened, but Mum caught me, took the phone off me and invited herself to Cedarfields.

“I understand that you’ve been helping Hannah through all this?”

Gran nods again and pours the milk in the cups then adds the tea. “You don’t take sugar.” More a statement than a question, but Mum still waves it away.

“Ivy, I don’t know where to start…” Mum stalls, revs up and tries again. “You should have come to me right away.”

“Paula, dear, you know I shouldn’t.”

Mum has no reply to this. I’m not surprised. I don’t either.

“Hannah’s the one who’s to make these decisions, not me.” She flickers a piercing gaze up at Mum. “Not you.”

“She’s only fifteen! What were you thinking? She needs help and support for a decision like this. This is something that changes not just her life, but the lives of everyone around her.”

I feel like asking Mum not to talk about me as if I’m not here, but perhaps it’s better this way.

“Hannah didn’t make this decision lightly, did you, love?”

I shake my head and stare at the floor.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Do you know how irresponsible it was to let her do this?”

“Do what, exactly?” Gran’s voice is sharp and it stops Mum short. They look at each other and I glance from one familiar face to the other, looking for something that seems obvious to everyone but me.

“You know what,” Mum mutters.

I’m confused. “Er, Mum?” I say. “I don’t…?”

Mum turns to me as if she really had forgotten I was there and the look she gives me isn’t one she’s practised a thousand times on a thousand troubled teenagers. It’s a look that seems to come from the saddest part of her soul.

“Hannah. I don’t think you should have decided to keep it.”

There’s a stillness in the room. Of course, I know that this is what she thinks. I’ve known it all along. But I never thought she’d say it. Not now. Not once I’d decided.

I stare hard at the floor, forcing back the tears that loom. A hand rests on mine and I turn my palm up to close my fingers around Gran’s. I hear a creak of a chair, feel the mattress bounce as Mum sits next to me and tries to put a comforting arm around me. The arm is there, but it brings no comfort.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” she whispers. “I will never say this again. But please, are you sure this is what you want? Are you sure you want to keep the baby?”

I feel Gran’s hand in mine, feel a little squeeze of the fingers. She has never asked me this, never doubted that I know my own mind. She knows me so much better than my own mother does.

Then I nod, just once, before finding out what it feels like to have my mother sob on me instead of Robert.

When Dad rings off after I call to thank him for my Christmas cheque, the handset informs me our conversation lasted three minutes and twenty-three seconds. Mum, who is standing over me, shakes her head.

“Let me guess, he’s working?”

I nod and she lets out an angry huff.

“Is he coming over soon?”

I nod again. He’s got a meeting with some producers later this month. Or early next month. I know how it is when pitching a script to the bigger players. Which I don’t. I’m fifteen. I know about handing in your homework on time and worrying about your bra size. But Dad doesn’t know how it is with me.

“Tell him when you see him. It’ll be easier face-to-face and another few weeks won’t make a difference.”

I try not to notice the little dig she got in there.

“I got you something,” I say to Neville as we sit down, the harsh winter light glinting on the frosted lawns outside the dining-room window. Hannah and her gran are out there walking arm in arm, careful steps across the salted paving.

I put a book on the table. It’s tied with brown string around the cover and there’s a piece of paper tucked under the string that says, Time to learn some new tricks, old }dog{ MAN.

Neville pulls the string off, grunts at the note then looks at the cover of the book.

Chambers Card Games

He looks at the note again and laughs.

We sat with Aaron and Neville at lunch. It was nice. Things at home are worse than awful — Mum can barely look at me, Lola’s throwing proper epic tantrums that even I can’t charm her out of and Robert’s fuming. Jay should have come home after his ski trip, but his mum dropped him at Imogen’s instead. Robert blew up at Jay about it and now they’re not speaking. The pair of them are so stubborn I’ll be surprised if we see Jay before next Christmas. Robert hasn’t told him what’s going on with me. I guess he wanted to do it in person and that’s why he went postal over the Imogen thing. Yet another problem I’ve caused.

Visiting Gran was a break from all that, or it was until Aaron asked me what I did for New Year.