Broken Soup Read online

  She said it was. She said she had.

  There was this horrible silence and I tried to wait it out, but I couldn’t.

  “Start talking, Bee, or never talk to me again.”

  “I was hiding at the back of the shop, trying to blend in. I was watching you. I’d never seen you out of school before. I was just watching.”

  I asked her if she knew Jack.

  “I knew him,” she said, closing her eyes.

  “How?”

  “From around.”

  “And you hung out? You were, like, friends?” All she did was nod. “You knew Jack. Did you know he was my brother?”

  “I did when I moved to your school. Someone told me.”

  “But you didn’t say.”

  “No.”

  “And then you met me and you still didn’t say.”

  “No.”

  “What, you didn’t know what to say?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So you just printed his picture in front of me and said fuck all. That’s weird, Bee. That’s wrong.”

  “I’m sorry. I was scared.”

  “Scared?” Bee, who lectured me about fear and said it wasn’t OK to go through life avoiding things you were afraid of. Bee, who reckoned she’d like to die flying. I laughed. “Scared of what? Not me.”

  “Just scared,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not OK. It’s a shitty thing to do. I still can’t believe you did it. Why would you do that to me?” I sounded spoiled. I didn’t like how I sounded. But I saw her in her bathroom, tidying up around me while I cried, sitting like stone by the window, saying nothing.

  “I did everything wrong,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be friends. I wanted you to find out. I didn’t want him to end up in the bin.”

  I thought about the negative, chucked in the bin in Jack’s room. I only got it back out because I wanted Bee to like me.

  I had this urge to move. I got up and asked her if she wanted anything from the shop, and when she said no, I went in anyway, just to get away. I looked at the stuff on the shelves and the things in the fridges and I didn’t want any of them. I watched her through the window and she had her head in her hands, her hair balled up in her fists. I went back outside empty-handed and sat down.

  I asked her about the postcard.

  She looked at me for a little too long, so I said, “It was in your book. I wasn’t snooping. Is it from him?”

  She felt around in her bag and got out the book. She gave me the card, picture side up, so I had to turn it over to find out.

  Jack’s handwriting was on the other. I stared at her for a beat before I read it.

  GORGEOUS GIRL,

  3 WEEKS AND I’LL BE HOME. WHAT A PLACE. FAKE LAKE WITH FAKE SAND. YOU’D LIKE THE OLD TOWN THOUGH. I WANT YOU TO BE HERE. COME AND BURN YOUR FEET ON THE ROCKS AND LIE WITH ME IN THE SUN. MAN, I MISS YOU. YOU TURNED ME INTO A F***ING ROMANTIC!

  3 WEEKS BEE X X J X X

  “Oh my God—you and Jack?” I said, and she nodded, her makeup running, a black line down the curve of each cheek. She wiped her face with the flats of her fingers.

  I stared at the pavement. I put my forehead down on the damp wood table and looked through the gaps and I tried to think straight. Bee and Jack. Jack and Bee.

  When I was born, Jack wanted more than anything else in the world for me to be a boy. We got told so many times about how he went up to the nurse on the ward and demanded she take me back. I hated that story because it left me out.

  Same as when Jack and Dad watched football and got that “You’re just a girl” look in their eyes. Or the time I found Jack and Tiger Charles trying to make a bonfire in the derelict house on Marsden Street and they wouldn’t let me join in.

  Jack and Bee put all of those things in the shade. They made me stand on a cliff edge of left-outness. My brother was in love and I didn’t know it. I never noticed. He never said.

  And then, when he’d gone, she didn’t even come and find me. Instead she put me through this, every step, and watched me squirm.

  What was the point of that?

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m not doing it.”

  “Rowan,” Bee said. “Please listen to me.”

  I looked over at her. How is it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time?

  “You asked me about him,” I said. “You made me tell you stuff. Did you already know it all? Was it a competition?”

  Her voice was so quiet compared to mine. “When we printed that picture, I thought we might talk about him. I wanted to tell you, but I got scared. You shut down. You couldn’t leave quick enough.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d just seen a ghost.”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I never met you. I never met any of your family. I was the last thing you needed, a stranger barging in and feeling the same way you did. It’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  “Why didn’t he bring you home and introduce you?”

  “We were a secret. It was our thing.”

  “Did his friends know?”

  “Nobody knew.”

  “Did you tell Carl?”

  “Yes, I told Carl. Jack used to come to the house a lot. Carl knew him too.” Her eyes filled up again then and she looked around her, left and right, like she wanted to run.

  “Carl?” I breathed out hard, tried to think straight. I said, “How come Carl let you print the picture in front of me? How come he didn’t say anything to me about Jack?”

  “He wouldn’t interfere. He said it was a mistake, after you’d gone, but he wouldn’t have stopped it. Not his way.”

  I waited for her to say something else. I just looked at her.

  “It’s not all about you.”

  “Say that again?”

  “It’s not all about you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re not the only person who lost Jack. You’re not the only one he left behind.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  Bee shrugged. There were whole worlds of sadness in her eyes. “I love him too, Rowan. I miss him too.”

  I looked over at the park, toward the sun. I could see Harper and Stroma, running in the low corner, circling with their arms out to their sides like airplanes, dodging each other, spinning out. Bee had that strange glow about her that you get from crying, like it’s been making you sick to keep it all in. I had no idea how I felt. If someone had asked me, I wouldn’t have understood what they were going on about.

  I got up again and she looked at me like “So go if you’re going” but I didn’t go anywhere. I went to her side of the table and I gave her a hug because I had no idea what to say. She hugged me back and we stayed like that for a while.

  A man sat opposite us with his coffee and pretended we weren’t there.

  A pigeon kept coming too close to my foot.

  I thought about the time I almost told Bee how much Jack would have liked her. I pictured him in that kitchen with Carl, taking the stairwells a flight at a time, standing by the front door with the geraniums and daisies.

  “Were you together for long?” I said.

  “About six months.” Bee smiled and wiped her face again. “Six months three weeks and four days.”

  I breathed out through my mouth, puffed out my cheeks.

  “He was going to tell you,” she said. “You were the person he most wanted to tell.”

  “Talk to me about him,” I said. “Tell me about how you met.”

  The first time Bee saw my brother, he was walking into Chalk Farm station and she was walking out. The wind was rushing through the doorway and his shirt was blowing flat against him and out behind. He looked like he was taking off and she laughed and so did he. And they said hello like they knew each other, even though they didn’t.

  She went home and thought about him. She had this picture of him in her head
, walking with the wind in his shirt.

  The second time she saw him was in Golders Hill Park. There was a ruined house there and even though she knew it wasn’t exactly a secret, being in the middle of London and everything, she was always surprised if other people were there. She was walking toward it and she was annoyed that someone was sitting on the raised floor between the broken pillars, because that was her place. When she saw it was Jack, she went and sat down, like they’d arranged to meet, like he’d been waiting. It couldn’t have been easier.

  The third time she saw him she said she loved him because she didn’t see the point in pretending not to and once you know, you know.

  “Your brother had the most beautiful skin,” she said. “I couldn’t stop looking at his skin. He was the funniest, sweetest, most give-everything, joy-finding, wisest human being I will ever know.”

  We were quiet for a while. My eyes were crying. I wasn’t sobbing or anything, no dramatic stuff. Just water. I looked at the grain of the table. I picked at it with my thumb. It was soft and damp from years of rain.

  I said, “You know, it’s the best picture of him I ever saw.”

  She took it on Hampstead Heath at five in the morning. They were high and they’d just seen a man on a white horse. They were trying to work out if they’d dreamed him or not. “Jack was laughing so hard,” she said. “At something he’d said, at how funny he was.” She shook her head at the thought. She shook her head and stopped smiling and remembered she was sad.

  “It was harsh of me to print it like that,” she said. “It was hardcore. I’m never going to feel good about that.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I wanted it back. I wanted you to know. It just kind of happened. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It would have ended up in the rubbish. I didn’t think it was anything. I only did it because I wanted you to like me.”

  “You could say the same about me,” she said. “Believe it or not.”

  When Harper and Stroma came back, Bee got up to go. I asked her what she was doing. I said, “You know I’ve wanted you two to meet for ages.”

  “I’m going to give you some space,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know. But I kind of need some, anyway. We have to talk some more. Will you call me later?”

  We hugged and it was awkward, and I told her that I’d been thinking all this time how well she and Jack would get on. Then she walked away with her incriminating bag and her sad face and her hair the same color as mine.

  Harper was behind me then. He said, “How was it?”

  I did the so-so thing with my hand, the thing Stroma always called Mr. Iffy. And before I could think about it or put it through Customs, I walked into him and put my forehead on his shoulder, my arms around his waist. He had his hand on the back of my head. His sweatshirt was warm. The smell of him was warm.

  Stroma went “Aaaah,” but Harper didn’t let go so I couldn’t turn to get at her.

  I said, “She knew him. She loved him.”

  He said, “You OK?”

  “No idea. She’s not. She loved him.”

  “Jesus.” His cheek was against my hair. We looked at our reflection in the shop window.

  “I wasn’t very fair,” I said. “I gave her a really hard time.”

  “You didn’t fight, though, right?”

  “No, we didn’t fight. I just made her feel worse than she did already.”

  “I think maybe you did that to each other. I think it’s not finished yet.”

  I phoned Bee while we were still outside the shop and Stroma was finishing her soup and chips for lunch. She didn’t pick up. I left a message saying, “Bee, it’s me. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t sinking in, but it will. I love you.”

  Stroma was dead quiet, like she knew something important was going on even if she didn’t know what it was. Harper kept giving me these worried glances. I just wanted to be on my own. There was a big old station clock inside the shop and I kept checking the time, like every less-than-a-minute, even though I knew what it was going to say.

  That afternoon Dad was supposed to be taking Stroma to Clown Town, one of those sweaty indoor playgrounds where you have to take your shoes off and everyone throws colored Ping-Pong balls at each other. The whole place smells like onions and feet. Stroma didn’t want to go. She wanted me to phone him and try and get her out of it, but I wouldn’t.

  I snapped at her and she went all sulky. Harper did this thing with his hands that meant “Don’t take it out on the kid” and I wanted to scream. I really did.

  I wanted to say, “Which kid? Because I’m actually one too, remember?”

  Everybody sat there without saying anything and then I stood up and said we had to go. Harper offered to drive us, but I turned him down in a cold sort of way and only threw in a thank-you out of habit. There was this voice in my head, some tiny bit of me that was still calm, saying Don’t blow it and What’s he done? Stuff like that. But I wasn’t really listening.

  My brother and Bee. That’s what I was thinking, over and over, about how sad it was.

  I hadn’t missed Jack in a while like I was missing him right then, like a slice had been taken out of me, like a big gaping hole.

  Poor Bee, missing him too.

  Fifteen

  On the way home Stroma started asking questions about Jack. It was the weirdest thing.

  She did that a lot at first, with this cold-blooded kind of curiosity, like she didn’t care he was dead that much but she just really needed to get at the facts. The whole time Mum and Dad were in France, calling every night in these leaden voices, trying not to tell me too much and then saying it all by crying just before they put the phone down. The whole time they were away and I was trying to be the big grown-up, Stroma was this seething bag of questions.

  How did he die? Where did he go? Would he keep on growing? Would we see him again? Could he see us? Was he going to get burned or buried? Where?

  I almost went insane.

  I wasn’t sleeping then either. I’m not sure how much sleep I got while we were on our own. I’d never been left before, to take care of things. I didn’t even like the dark back then, for God’s sake. I think I pretended like everything was fine, saying good-bye to Mum and Dad and all that, because what choice did I have? But that first night, when the light started to go and the rooms got dark and every sound seemed strange to me—too loud and kind of angry—I knew how hard it was going to be.

  Stroma slept, of course, and ate like a horse, and walked around the house talking about coloring books just like everything was normal. I sort of hated and admired her at the same time. And I tried to answer her questions, even though my voice felt like it was coming from somewhere outside of itself, even though I thought my heart and the inside of my head must have been scooped out just to be able to stand them.

  Maybe someone else’s answers would have had more icing on, but I gave it to Stroma pretty straight. I thought she deserved it. Anyway, I’m not big on icing. Mum and Dad didn’t bring us up that way. I wouldn’t line up to see a weeping statue, or a woman who can heal the sick just by touching them, or the face of Jesus on a tortilla. I never believed that Jack was watching us from his new home on a cloud, or was about to be reborn somewhere else, a future midwife in India, or goatherd in the Andes.

  I do believe in some miracles, earthly ones, things that happen every day and get overlooked. Miracles of probability, like the fact you get born as you and not someone else entirely.

  Dad explained the math of it to me and Jack once. “Two people choose each other out of a possible six and a half billion and growing,” he said. “They have sex countless times, and at one moment and not another of these occasions they conceive a child.” (I giggled at the sex bit, but only because Jack was elbowing me.) “For conception to happen, one out of five hundred million sperm”—giggle—“has to get to one of four hundred thousand eggs”—snigger—“chosen at rando
m and present in the woman’s body since she was in her own mother’s womb. Cell division then begins to make one unique and unrepeatable human to add to the six and a half billion.”

  We were never fooled into expecting an afterlife, like the life we got given somehow wasn’t enough. But it clearly hadn’t stopped Stroma from checking. Maybe that’s just something you have when you’re little that you lose later on, a complete and total trust in the supernatural.

  One of Stroma’s words back then was possible. She knew the Earth was round and gravity kept us from falling off because she’d been taught it by Mrs. Hall, her teacher, and everything Mrs. Hall said was “biblical fact.” But she still said the Earth and all the other planets could just be crumbs in a giant’s pocket—it was still “possible.”

  “Do you think a little bit of Jack got left behind anywhere?” Stroma asked me on the way back from the shop. My head was full of Bee and him, him and Bee.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Well, I know he’s dead and everything, and he’s not coming back, because I’m not a total idiot,” she started, “but I just thought a bit of him might be somewhere.”

  “Like where?”

  “In his room or his pictures or that ‘Sorry, Stroma’ thing on my tape.”

  “What thing?” I said.

  “My tape,” Stroma said. “Didn’t you hear it?” I shook my head. “That means you don’t stay until I’m asleep like you say you do.”

  “Whatever, Stroma. What are you talking about? What’s ‘Sorry, Stroma’?”

  “It’s Jack,” she said. “Little Miss Muffet is on and it’s near the end of side one I think, maybe side two, and then I say ‘Jack’ like this—Jaaaack—and my voice is really little, and he says, ‘Sorry, Stroma.’ And then it’s Miss Muffet again and I want to know if that’s an actual bit of Jack I’ve got, because it’s his real voice and everything.”

  “It’s possible,” I said, because it was such a good thought for her to have and I was dying to hear him. I said if she played it to me, I’d show her a picture I thought had a bit of Jack in it too.