You Again Read online

  She shrugged. “I’m not a pharmacist. I’m a cognitive behavioural therapist.”

  “I can handle it.” I heard an angrier edge creeping into my voice. “Taking something, doing something, that’s gotta be better than doing nothing.”

  “You’re here, Lennox, talking to me. That’s doing something.”

  “I can’t go on like this,” I whispered, leaning forward, anger replaced with desperation. “Please.”

  “Trust me. Opiates are not the answer.”

  “It could work for me. Until I discovered other options?”

  “You would need to increase the dosage,” she reminded me. “Increase the dosage, Lennox,” she repeated. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I stared at her, sullen and unresponsive.

  “What you think could be the cure,” she elaborated carefully, “will kill you in the end.”

  Much as I liked to be right all the time, Mrs Martel had the measure of me: whatever I took, it would never be enough.

  I just had to look at Angie to know this. One kiss, zero chance I’d ever let her go. I don’t know what it was about her.

  Until now, she’d mostly dodged me; made me do the running. She had impressive defensive moves, too, which meant that it had been impossible to get too close. Until Louise-day that is, that day had certainly closed a gap. Big time. I also had the Lennox inbuilt persistence on my side. I guess she needed to know that I wouldn't give up on her. I guess she needed me to tell her.

  Angie told me that Louise never talked about me again. No surprise there. I was obviously so toxic, I was off-topic. I could imagine the woman repeating the mantra: if we don’t talk about him, he doesn’t exist. Whatever, man. You can’t suppress all of the people all of the time.

  School was forever swarming with people, fangirls and friendbots, y’know, too loud for a deep conversation with someone one-on-one, but I’d meet Angie at a skate park in the evenings. It was never straightforward though. Sometimes the people living in nearby houses called out the police – we were an antisocial mob, apparently.

  “Ever get the feeling we’re always on the run?” I put this question to Angie one night as we headed back to the Tube station, skateboards under our arms. We’d barely started out when the blue lights turned up. The flashing blue, making my world light-dark, light-dark, sent me wrong, made me sweat.

  “Best way to stay ahead of trouble,” answered Angie, striding ahead to prove a point. “Keep moving.” I jogged to catch up.

  The cops were usually sympathetic to our case – hardened individuals who’d seen the darker side of life and knew that kids on boards were not depraved humans doing despicable things. Skateboarders just put in tricks and turns, no one got hurt. We landed hard. We were moved on.

  Angie told me about her birth-certificate problem. I think it bothered me more than it did her. She shrugged it off as an inconvenient shit-happens situation but I said she didn’t deserve this. She’d lost enough without adding official paperwork to the missing list.

  “I also lied a little,” she confessed later. “I didn’t trade exclusive information with you.”

  “I guessed other people had to know,” I said laughing.

  “Just two.”

  “Your aunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vivienne Lee?”

  “You got me.” She smiled, hands up.

  “Still. It was a big reveal. I’m allowed to feel flattered, right?”

  I’d written the rules: make sure you share a secret, or promise to keep a secret, in order to break down antitrust issues.

  “I guess.” She sounded confident but fleetingly looked lost.

  I pulled her into me before we headed down the escalator to catch our train. “You exist,” I whispered, my mouth gently closing over hers. There was nothing else to add.

  “Now tell me something about you that no one else knows,” she insisted when we were back on street level again.

  “I can’t live without you,” I shouted above the roar of buses owning the streets. People walking to the station didn’t even give me a second glance. Londoners, I’d come to realise, had heard it all before.

  Angie hadn’t though. She pulled her baseball cap down over her face, embarrassed smile. I ducked under the peak of her cap to get a better look at her. She leaned into me. I held my breath.

  What you think could be the cure will kill you in the end.

  Mrs Martel walked into our chemistry class, had a few quiet words with the teacher, scanned the room, spotted me, walked back out.

  I hadn’t bothered to turn up at a session earlier. She didn’t call me out in class. Thinking it through, it didn’t really surprise me. Code of ethics, I suppose. Sessions with the school therapist, however, were like a trip to the Apple store. It’s our generation fixation: we’re all at it. More to the point, privacy is so last century.

  It wasn’t like I was never going to drop in on a session ever again. Right now though I was doing alright. One hour with Angie Anderson was worth a thousand hours trawling through thoughts and flashbacks. I would go over and over the same old ground with Mrs Martel, investigating the same old thoughts, the same old me. Angie, she pushed me until I was running to keep up. Leaving the old me behind.

  Mrs Martel, however, didn’t see it like this, as I was about to find out. I didn’t see her coming; a whispering rustle of black material behind me and there she was.

  “Lennox, may I have a word with you, please?”

  Head inside my locker, I considered ignoring her. Hoping she would just give up and walk off.

  Seconds later, I looked down. Black pointed shoes confirmed that she was still there, to my left, still standing on the other side of the locker door.

  She would wait me out, no doubt about that.

  I stepped into her line of vision, pulled an appropriate facial expression out of the bag: fake surprise.

  “Miss?” I added an innocent inflection to the word.

  “You did, you missed a session.”

  “I did.” I confirmed, nodding to show I was serious.

  “I didn’t receive word that it would be cancelled.”

  “Ah. About that, I…”

  “I have had to come looking for you. To make sure you were okay.” There was a level of concern to her words but that was cancelled out by the unimpressed tone to her voice.

  “Still alive,” I confirmed, reassuring her with an illuminating smile.

  “I can see that.”

  “It’s all good,” I reassured her. “Better than ever. Hanging out with someone who gets me, you know?”

  “Someone?” She pounced.

  “Yeah.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I need to go,” I replied, looking at my watch.

  “Lennox,” she warned, “someone isn’t the answer right now.”

  “You haven’t met her,” I said. “You wouldn’t know.”

  She looked around to make sure no one was listening to our conversation. Everyone had gone home. Like where I wanted to be right now. “You weren’t in a great place last week, Lennox,” she said.

  “I’ve moved on.”

  “I have a session available tomorrow morning at ten.”

  “I’m good. But thanks.”

  She looked disappointed and I attempted to soften the blow. “Seriously,” I reassured her, “I haven’t had a flashback in a week now, headaches under control. No need for those painkillers. Sorted.”

  “I know you don’t need painkillers,” she replied quietly. “Codeine or whatever – opioids do not know how to control, or contain, fear.”

  13

  Angie: questions

  When Lennox met Louise there were no group hugs or dinner invitations. What did I expect? I don’t know why I even bothered. I guess I’m hardwired to disappointments but a part of me hadn’t entirely given up on hope. I’ll learn, I guess.

  Louise was freaking me out, like she’d finally, after all these years, got aroun
d to reading the paperwork that went with legal guardianship and realised that, holy shit, she should be doing more. Trust her to decide to take an interest in me when I least needed the interference. No bedtime stories, ever, as a child and yet she thought that a sudden surge of irrational self-serving relationship advice would save me in my teens? Um, I don’t think so. I’d save me thanks very much.

  Fortunately, incredibly, Lennox didn’t do a runner after meeting her. He hung in there. He wasn’t totally himself throughout the encounter, a little off-balance but, hey, it takes someone special to shrug off an acidic first encounter like that. It could have put him off me for life – discovering that I had a blood relative like Louise Lowe. Less gene pool, more cesspit.

  I told him that Louise never talked about him again but I lied. If I’d told him the truth, if he’d known her opinions, he would have definitely have hightailed it. I realised I didn’t want that to happen.

  Like I’d said, the skateboard saved me. It was a mantra, a code, a language, a family, a tribe. It was also an identification badge and a bridge that had made the turbulent crossing from childhood to teen so much easier. It was now bringing me closer to Lennox. It allowed me to lean in; a skill I’d never mastered until now but that was purely down to lack of opportunity, practice and confidence. When no one has ever loved you, it damages you, scars you on the inside, kills you slowly. You come to believe it’s because you’re unloveable and that somehow it’s your fault.

  Louise would agree with me on one thing: she hadn’t a clue how to cope with a child, of any age. To be fair, she’d never had children of her own, although first-time parents generally seem to be able to manage well enough without previous experience. But she had taken me in because there was no one else who could. I was her niece. Her husband had left her. I filled a space. She never talked about the past. I wasn’t encouraged to ask questions, she told me no lies. This sort of mute-button existence worked well between us for the first few years of my life but I guess that was purely down to the fact that I had a very limited vocabulary.

  Louise couldn’t handle it when I got older and started asking about personal stuff. I craved information about my parents, I needed to know. I wanted to hear everything, right down to the tiniest, weirdest details such as did my mother spread marmalade or jam on her toast? Did my father wear casual shoes or polished ones with laces? Laces, scissors, paper, home – words punctuated by questions, trying to find the answers to help fill in those holes in my heart.

  Eight years old and going “off the rails”. I’m not sure I was ever on the rails in the first place but it is an expression that people like to use. Professionals have more technical expressions but it all means the same: lost.

  Learning the truth knocked me off balance, off the rails, down, dark, lost. Almost-normal people have a past. I had a file. It contained a collection of observations by therapists, followed by their opinions, assessments and illegible signatures. Therapist MacKenzie was the first person to actually tell me the truth and, as part of the process, he introduced me to "imaginal confrontation". It's like re-visiting the worst thing that ever happened to you and realising that this "worst" was real, not a dream. This dream, this nightmare, had actually happened to me.

  It didn’t happen overnight but I found that I was quite good at “imaginal confrontation”. I am asleep in my pram when the worst happens. I am powerless to stop an unprovoked attack: a 15-year-old drug addict pulling out a handgun and firing at my innocent mother and father just because they didn’t hand over their watches or whatever.

  It doesn’t make sense to me. In spite of the fact that I’ve had access to the police report as part of therapy sessions. I’ve even revisited the park. Who guns down an innocent couple pushing a pram? Not literally “Who”, obviously, because I had a name from the reports but what kind of person. Imaginal confrontation: I’d ask him why he did such a terrible thing because it had to be more than a fatal tussle over small change.

  The fact that he was dead didn’t make it better in the slightest. Revenge is one thing but I wanted answers, not a buried silence. Official line, closed case. Emotional line, no closure, my open case. I had endless questions and enough imagination to last me a lifetime.

  I could revisit the same scene forever and a day but those memories would never share their secrets with me. Just like my parents, the answers to my questions were buried forever.

  MacKenzie helped me recognise and process these feelings. When I said that I felt powerless, he asked me what I could have done. I was quick off the mark with an answer: I would have shot the drug addict. I would have taken the gun and put a bullet in his heart.

  If MacKenzie had been surprised at this answer from an eight-year-old, he didn’t show it. He’d heard worse, I’m sure.

  “You were a baby, Angie,” he reminded me. “Babies don’t use guns. Most people don’t know how to use guns.”

  I remember lashing out at him, small fists battering his chest. “Then stop asking me stupid questions,” I screamed.

  He caught my fists and brought them down onto my knees, restraining me until I relaxed under his gentle pressure.

  “It’s not a stupid question, Angie,” he said in a soothing voice. “It is the most important question you’ll ever ask yourself because the answer has the power to silence the voices in your head – voices that will haunt you until you die if you don’t find a way to silence them. What could you have done, Angie? Tell me.”

  I wriggled my hands out from under his and wrapped my arms around myself, rocking back and forth. I thought hard. I re-experienced the scene. I am out of sight, as good as invisible, inside a pram.

  I whispered, “There was nothing I could have done to stop it. I was just a baby.”

  Now, age 15, I was an expert at silencing the voices. There was nothing I could have done. Not one single thing. I also discovered that music helped me to drown out unnecessary noise. I’d pull on over-ear headphones, green Beats, big bass, no problems.

  The sound of the skateboard was also my kind of music, a loud ride as we’d say – wheels running on a concrete bowl. Yes, the skateboard also brought me closer to Lennox.

  The moment I saw him effortlessly take to his board I knew what was going to happen next. I had fallen for him hard and fast and, just like before, there was nothing I could have done to stop it.

  Louise was at the breakfast table. I blinked to erase the image then realised it wasn’t a bad dream, I was definitely awake, she was definitely there. She wasn’t a morning person, ever, and I didn’t appreciate this sudden, drastic change in my routine.

  She was distracted, swishing her fingers around in a cup of scalding water in an attempt to retrieve a teabag. I had to admire her pain threshold, she didn’t so much as flinch. Mission accomplished, she then dunked a biscuit into the tea, chocolate melting. The kind of insulin-wrecking breakfast she loved.

  She was so preoccupied, I thought I’d be able to grab my bag and board and sprint out the door without the slightest interaction. Then she spoke.

  “Vivienne called round at the house last night.”

  I hesitated and looked over at her. “My Viv?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked doubtful. Viv used her phone not her feet.

  “Apparently, it’s the only way she can reach you these days. Said her phone must be broken so she popped over in person.”

  “Viv can be a drama queen,” I snapped. I felt a rush of guilt, it made me try to explain. “If I don’t return a text message the second she sends one, it’s a total disaster.”

  “Vivienne is a friend.”

  I edged closer to the table. Louise put down her tea.

  “I know that,” I said, warning voice.

  “You really think Lennox Jones is worth it?”

  “What are you going on about?” Alarm bells ring-a-dinged. She said Lennox’s name, I went into defensive mode. I was prepared to fight his corner.

  “Vivienne said she hasn’t seen you.” />
  “Viv sees me every day in school.”

  “Then why does she have to come round here looking for you?”

  “Like you care?”

  “I knew he was trouble.”

  “You don’t know him at all,” I shouted. It was impossible not to react. Happy families wasn’t a game we played.

  “He is arrogant and possessive. I could tell that he wanted you all to himself.”

  I widened my eyes incredulously. “He wants me. Okay? You never did. I don’t see a problem.”

  “Grow up, Angie. It’s not about me, it’s about your friends. It’s about Vivienne.”

  I threw up my hands in exasperation. “I’ll talk to Viv. It’s no big deal.”

  “Be careful, Angie. I know trouble when I see it.”

  “Lennox is good to me,” I said, dropping my voice to a warning whisper. “He is generous and kind. He likes what I like. I like spending time with him. You seem determined to ruin the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I inhaled hard, tears threatened so I blinked hard, “and I don’t understand why.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Tears disappeared, I burst out laughing. It was an outrageous excuse.

  “I am hurt, Louise,” I said simply. “That’s all I know how to be. Lennox is helping me to turn that around.”

  “How did he break his nose?” she asked, eyebrows disappearing into her hairline.

  “He met a rock he didn’t like,” I drawled, remembering Lennox’s line. “He’s a surfer.”

  “You believed him?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I think he’s a fighter.”

  I was astonished. Louise obviously wasn’t going to let it go.

  “A fighter?” I repeated.

  “I was married to a policeman, remember? Question everything, Angie. Look for clues.”

  I’d heard enough. I turned abruptly and stomped out of the house, head all over the place; full-revolution spin without the board.

  Maybe hurt was how it was supposed to be, forever.