Sunflowers in February Read online

  ‘It will get better, James. It may not seem like it now, but it will. Trust me. Hold on to that thought.’

  But James continued to hide behind his hands. He had failed. Life had proved too fragile and he’d broken it.

  I stay with Ben all night.

  I don’t know how to go anywhere else anyway. It’s a scary prospect, being trapped like this, by some kind of virtual glue, in this universal chasm. I no longer need to sleep. I can’t get into my own bed, or turn on the television, or eat, or hold a conversation, or go and see Beth or Nathan. I can’t do anything and it’s terrifying. ‘I’m right here, Ben,’ I tell him. ‘I’m right, sodding, bloody HERE. Find me!’

  But there’s nothing … not a turn of the head or a twitch of the lips. I resort to poking my finger into his eye, then his other eye, then flicking the end of his nose, like I loved doing before, when he was asleep, but still nothing – my fingers simply pass undetected through his nostrils.

  The gradually lightening sky brings Monday, and the first day of half-term, but for Ben time and agenda won’t matter right now. A group of us were supposed to be going out tonight. Me and Nathan, Ben, Matthew, Beth and several others, but that idea sure is ruined now. Ben falls asleep eventually, fully clothed and on top of the duvet, early daylight filling the room and his phone flashing silent messages beside him.

  I miss Ben already. A lifetime of knuckle burns on top of my head, or the stinging flick of a tea towel on the back of my thigh, or violently chucking me out of my comfy seat in front of the television, so that he could prove his size over me and sit wherever he wanted. I’d made it my personal mission to retaliate by sabotaging whatever he had been into over the years: toys, cars and more recently fraping his social media sites. I’d become an expert at firing elastic bands with amazing accuracy, or stealing his stash of sweets or money. The list was endless between us, and the merciless fighting was constant but we loved it. The tellings-off that we got from Mum and Dad were both frequent and ignored.

  ‘I’m obviously the superior twin,’ I told him often over the years, since I had made it down the birth canal first. Nearly sixteen years ago on 3rd June, I was born a full hour and a half before Ben finally decided to turn up. I could imagine myself pushing and shoving my way past him, in my eagerness to be first, and then we’d spent the next fifteen and three-quarter years behaving in exactly the same way, competing for the best of everything, from the first go down the slide at the park to grabbing at the biggest slice of cake. Yet in truth our love for each other was our strength. We fought each other’s cause, when needed, with the determination of gladiators and we protected each other from the rest of the world like private bodyguards.

  We were always in tune with each other. We were each other.

  I look out of the window and down at the street below. A woman is pushing an empty buggy in the early-morning light, and holding the woolly-mittened hand of a small child. The walk is painfully slow, as the child stops to investigate everything. A leaf on the ground, something in the gutter, an aeroplane overhead. Her whole life is in front of her, exciting and inviting, and I’m totally envious of her. They disappear from my view, and if I still had a beating heart, I believe it would be heavy with missed chances. ‘When did we stop noticing everything?’ I ask Ben’s sleeping body. ‘When did the wonder of it all fade away?’

  Ben stirs. He breathes in and groans, deep and croakily. Then he sits up suddenly, as if he has just been punched in the stomach, by the memory of what happened yesterday. A tear makes a single, watery track down his cheek and I watch it travel slowly at first, then race down his skin to plop off his jaw. He scratches his cheek where the tear tickled his skin, but he doesn’t attempt to wipe the wetness away. Another tear makes a track down his cheek, then another, and another, until he presses his head back onto the pillow where they change their watery tracks to his temples and into the blackness of his hair.

  ‘So you did give a shit all these years,’ I joke. But, even so, I turn away. I can’t bear to see him this way, because even without a physical body of my own I get his pain. It’s just that thing we do and never question, an illness, a sadness or something funny. I still get his pain … but can he still get mine?

  Ben punches the bed beside him with his fist and shouts a single angry ‘FUCK’ to the air … or to himself … or to me.

  Nathan’s mum took her car early to the place round the corner to get it washed, then nipped home to finish getting ready for work until it was done. She heard Nathan coming down the stairs, and despite the fact that she was perhaps a bit late to leave for work it didn’t pass her by that he was up ridiculously early for a school holiday.

  ‘Who are you? And what have you done with my son?’ she joked with him, throwing him a quizzical smile. ‘You do realise it’s half-term, Nate? You don’t have to get up until at least bedtime.’ Engrossed in the flashing screen of his phone, he leant against the door frame to the kitchen with an unfamiliar expression on his face.

  She gave up waiting for a reply and turned to the ornate hall mirror, putting her favourite red lipstick on, before slipping into her shoes, which perfectly matched her jacket. Then she pulled on her coat, which nipped in smartly at the waist, picked up her half-empty coffee mug from the mahogany hall table and smiled her famously beautiful smile at her gorgeous son.

  ‘Mind, love, I’m running late,’ she told him, as she pinched his cheek gently so she could get past and into the kitchen.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ Her mind was flitting in all directions. Have I got my phone? Where did I put the car keys? Someone’s dead …

  ‘Lily,’ he replied, as if hardly bearing to hear himself say it out loud. His voice cracked …’ My Lily.’ He clutched his phone, which bleeped in his hands yet again. It was full of messages shared throughout the night by shocked and saddened friends, the second after Ben had texted Matthew. Nathan imagined that at this moment everyone was saying the same thing. ‘Shit! Lily Richardson is dead!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ She gasped. ‘Your Lily? How awful. How did it happen?’ She turned to him and placed a tender hand on the back of his head while standing on tiptoe to kiss his forehead.

  ‘I’ll ring work and tell them I’m going to be late this morning,’ she told him over her shoulder as she headed across the kitchen to put her mug in the sink. Family always first, she thought.

  ‘They think she got run over down King’s Lane on Saturday … that’s where they found her,’ he said.

  Nathan’s mum dropped the mug before she got to the sink and it smashed on the tiled floor.

  Not only is being dead traumatic and upsetting, it’s also deeply boring.

  Monday drags itself horribly slowly, and I watch Mum swallow a pill with one hand while holding a cup of coffee and a cigarette with the other, the steam and the smoke swirling into the air as one. Caffeine, nicotine and benzodiazepine. ‘Very healthy, Mum,’ I tell her. I know it is bizarre to watch people grieving for me, and I’m possibly a tiny bit flattered. But I can see their pain and the fact that I have caused it, and I wish from the very depths of my soul that I could change things.

  Dad is still in the lounge, crumpled and silent. Stubble is pushing its way through his chin and there’s a dark stain of spilt whisky on his jumper. He looks a bit like Homeless Bob, the rough sleeper in town who everyone tries to ignore.

  Everyone, it seems to me, grieves in different ways. They go quiet, they go loud, they talk a lot, they don’t talk at all, they cry, they don’t cry. And Mum and Dad are going through this beside each other rather than together. Mum’s rattling with tranquillisers while Dad’s locked within the confines of his own head and drowning in a vat of whisky.

  I’m really worried about Beth and how she’s feeling, and I guess Nathan will also know by now. Are they OK? Will Beth find another best friend and will Nathan keep counting the weeks and days that we have been together, as I still do, or will he stop at seven weeks and o
ne day? I’m desperate to go and see them both but I still can’t leave the house, and I don’t understand why. As if being dead wasn’t bad enough, being trapped in the house is adding insult to injury. It’s not like I can feel the strength of the brick or the firmness of the doors; it’s more like that thing you get in a dream when you want to run away from something but you can’t. I had been able to travel with my own dead body to the hospital mortuary, and I travelled with my family to my house, but I can’t go anywhere else.

  I curl my fingers round Dad’s so it looks as if I’m holding his hand. I want him to know I’m there, to squeeze back and be strong for me like he always is, but he doesn’t believe in all that ‘spiritualistic bollocks’, as he calls it. Every time there is anything about mediums or ghosts on the television, he tuts.

  If only he knew.

  ‘Dad? Please find me.’ I try to nudge him. ‘It isn’t bollocks. Trust me.’

  In the forecourt of Spanners Auto Repair Centre, Fred had been hand-washing a car when a police vehicle drew up and a female officer got out. The brown hair of the police officer was scraped into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, and her rounded police hat was perched importantly on her head. Fred began to feel the first flush of excitement. He loved a drama.

  He looked across the tarmac to the main repair workshop and saw through the office window that his boss was on the phone, so he took it upon himself to approach the police officer to ask if there was anything he could do to help, his head bobbing up and down in his strange, eager way.

  The officer tried to ignore the constant bobbing of his head as she spoke.

  ‘There’s been a local incident that I would like to talk to you about,’ she said, taking in Fred’s dirty boiler suit and eyeing a much smarter-dressed man in the office. ‘But,’ she added quickly, ‘I’ll wait until he is off the phone, and until –’ she jerked a thumb towards the mechanic under a jacked-up car – ‘he can unpin himself and listen in as well.’ She smiled at him, but mainly because he had a strip of black oil above one eyebrow and another along his top lip like a comedy moustache. Fred turned and hollered loudly over his shoulder, almost bellowing in her ear.

  ‘Mike, come ’ere, there’s a officer wants to see us.’ And he made excited beckoning signals to his boss with one hand, while pointing at the very important police person he was standing next to with the other hand.

  While they waited, Fred decided to tell her everything about himself that he could think of, battering her with so much verbal diarrhoea that PC Jenkins wasn’t even sure if Fred was taking in breath between sentences. By the time he got to a relative of a friend of a friend who was a community police person, she had long since given up listening to him.

  The other mechanic turned out to be a she, not a he, and PC Jenkins felt a tug of guilt that, as a fellow woman, she had made the subconscious assumption that you needed male genitalia to work with cars. The boss finished his call and both were now coming over, joined by a very thin young lad with oily overalls and black nails. As she told them about the recent fatal hit-and-run incident she watched genuine sympathy flit around their faces, while Fred unnecessarily punctuated everything she said with ‘yes’ and a bob of his head. They took on board the serious issue of looking out for any car that may have received a significant impact on the bodywork, and made a note of how to correctly report any relevant information to the police.

  Fred, with assumed importance, escorted her to her next point of call, which was the petrol station next door.

  ‘My niece got knocked off her bike when she was a kid but fortunately only broke her leg, and we’ve only been open for two hours today but already we’ve ’ad five cars in, and if any come in with summink suspicious about ’em, I’m the one what will notice. In fact, I’m doing a really dirty car now –’

  PC Jenkins stopped him politely. ‘Thanks, Fred –’ she smiled at him – ‘I’m sure you will. Now I’ve got to get on.’ And she retreated inside the petrol station with immense relief.

  Fred nodded happily at the back of her head as the door shut in front of him, then made his way back to the car he had been cleaning. He would most definitely keep an eye out for anything suspicious.

  Pouring warm water over the last traces of mud on Mrs Peterson’s car, Fred ran his cloth over its huge curves and chrome trim, restoring it to its normal pristine condition.

  Nathan’s mum had watched the discussion through the window of the petrol station, almost rigid with fear, having leapt in there when she saw the police turn up.

  What on earth should she do?

  Her limbs had transformed into jelly and she didn’t realise she was making rapid breathy sounds in her throat until an old lady placed a wrinkly hand on her shoulder. She had almost knocked the poor woman off her feet, she’d jumped so much.

  Had she really killed that poor girl … her own son’s girlfriend?

  How much wine had she had that afternoon? Surely not that much? What would the other ladies tell the police? Would anyone say she’d been drinking?

  The implications of what would happen if she came forward were huge. Her own son, her own beautiful, funny, loving son … would despise her.

  Even as she thought of it, she realised that right at that moment, Fred could be washing away all evidence of her ever having been in King’s Lane. It won’t change anything for Lily, she thought, but maybe … just maybe, no one will ever know.

  When the police woman came into the petrol station shop she hid in the public toilet at the back of the shop for so long that five different people tried the handle before she dared to leave.

  It doesn’t take long for the police to work out what happened to me.

  Although my use of social media, and any form of contact with friends had been frantically investigated, it was, as they informed my family, Beth who had been able to provide them with the information they required. She’d been able to tell them about my lie because I didn’t have enough bus fare for the whole way home, and she didn’t have any left to give me. She was able to tell them that I had been perfectly happy, that I definitely wasn’t planning on meeting anyone else, and that we’d said goodbye at the bus station, because she was staying in town to meet her dad for dinner. She had no idea how far my bus money had got me or where I had got off.

  CCTV showed me getting on to the bus that went to our village at 16.45 and the driver subsequently confirmed that I had bought a ticket only as far as Burmont Corner where I had got off, and walked, seemingly attempting to cut through King’s Lane across countryside to home. My mobile showed that I’d last used it at 17.16 to send a text to Mum, telling her I was on my way home, and by this time it would have been almost dark. I’d then listened to music through my earphones, and had probably died sometime around 17.30, which was how long it would have taken me to walk to King’s Lane.

  Brian informed my family that, although an autopsy would be carried out as soon as possible, early indications all point to a straight hit-and-run as they had previously thought. He added that unfortunately it had rained heavily through the night before the cold snap had turned it to ice, which meant that the footprints and tyre tracks were impossible to determine, but the police were doing everything they could to find the driver.

  ‘Why won’t he just bloody own up to what he did?’ Dad had grumbled angrily. Brian added kindly that I probably hadn’t heard the vehicle because I was using earphones; I would have known nothing about it, and I wouldn’t have been scared.

  I didn’t know anything about it, but I had been scared.

  I finally remember.

  I’d been getting very freaked out about how drizzly and dark it was becoming so quickly, and my heart was pounding, and my throat was tight from breathing in the February air. I was going to cut through King’s Lane because it was quicker, but the puddles and the mud were making my feet wet and cold, and it was all such a really stupid idea. I’d hoped desperately that it wouldn’t get dark until I got to a part of the walk home that was l
it by street lamps, and also a little less deserted … but it did. Before I even got to King’s Lane the surrounding trees and hedges were just a mass of silhouetted shapes against a darkening sky.

  I was, as he says, listening to music on my phone, because I was trying to calm myself down. It didn’t occur to me to think that it would have been safer to listen for traffic instead of to music.

  The next thing I knew was that I found myself sitting on the grass beside my dead self in the cool blue light of Sunday morning.

  What I do know, for sure, is that if I hadn’t spent part of my bus fare on a stupid pair of earrings, I wouldn’t have had to walk, and I would still be alive. I know that I quite simply died for that pair of earrings, which funnily enough was exactly what I had said to Beth at the time: ‘I’d die for them, Beth; they’re gorgeous.’

  I feel strange.

  I don’t know what it is because it’s not like I actually have a living body to feel strange in, but whatever it is it is definitely a very odd thing.

  Mum is falling asleep on the sofa, tiredness drawing dark lines around her eyes, and even though it’s only been three days a nasty yellow stain is forming on the tips of her fingers.

  I think I may be disappearing, because it’s like a kind of pulling sensation is happening from the very middle of me.

  As I can’t physically hold on to anything, I fix my gaze hard on Mum as if what I can see might be the only thing that will stop me evaporating.

  So this is it, I’m going.

  I’m finally leaving this weird gap between life and death, and I really don’t want to go, and I’m sure as hell not ready.

  ‘MUM?’ I shout at her, but her eyes finally shut and her mouth drops open. ‘PLEASE, MUM?’ My begging words are possibly the only thing left in the room, as the rest of me is dragged through some kind of virtual sieve.