A Likely Story

6. deckle edge

 It was a week later on Tuesday morning and three things had changed.

The first was that I hadn't seen Katie or Matt or Luke since Sunday night.

After GCSEs ended and summer holidays started early, I had spent almost every night with them. Katie and Matt had texted me around ten times each, asking what I was doing. I'd fobbed them off by saying that my mum had grounded me, but I knew they hadn't believed it; I had spent the end of term sneaking out to meet them when I was supposed to be revising. I didn't even know why I suddenly wasn't so keen on going out anymore; maybe because I had finally started to realise how miserable it made me.

The second was that I hadn't spoken to my mother since Sunday night.

I wasn't prepared to go through any of our usual post-argument scenarios, in which she tried to turn it into a joke and eventually I got tired of being angry; or when she would keep demanding that I speak to her and I'd get so annoyed that eventually I did. I didn't know when I was prepared to speak to her, or if I ever would be. There was an implacable devastation in what I felt that had fermented into anger, and it was something so scarily strong that I simply couldn't bring myself to say anything. The strange thing about it all was that she seemed to understand. She kept out of my way, and it was like we were two people who didn't know each other. It made me want to cry, but I didn't.

The third was that Charlie and I were friends.

Pretty good friends; friends that smiled at each other from behind bookcases and laughed at how ridiculous some of the customers were; the lady who couldn't have been younger than sixty, with bright purple hair and a thick American accent; the man who came in every week to buy a copy of Beano without fail. It was weird how you can go from hating someone to sitting behind the front desk eating dark chocolate with them, dark chocolate that was, incidentally, a very effective cure for hangovers. Somehow we were friends, and it was pretty cool.

It was half past nine and I was in the middle of pushing the front door open with my white lace ups (which I had decided were in a better state than my black plimsolls- they were looking rather worse for wear) when I heard a sound behind me. I looked around, my foot still on the door, and saw my mother standing beside the stairs, in the middle of the hallway. She was dressed in her long soft lavender pyjama bottoms that she hadn't worn for years, and that immediately brought back a multitude of memories that smelt of freshly laundered sheets. Her dressing gown was wrapped around her body, and she stood with her arms folded around her waist, with an air of vulnerability that was strange and unfamiliar.

“Lools,” she said.

She knew that she wasn't allowed to call me that, and I definitely wasn't going to say anything in response; she'd said it to try and get me to talk. I looked at her for a few seconds in silence, and then went on to gently kick open the door with my foot. Summer air poured into the tepid hallway and I stepped outside.

From inside I heard a quiet sentence. “You're doing well,” she said, and there was a quiet pride that lingered in the three words as I walked away.

***

My feet landed with a thud onto the inside of the front desk, leaving my legs outstretched onto a pot of paperclips and a hole puncher, narrowly missing the ancient computer. I was launched back alarmingly far in the black swivel chair. The person who had pushed my feet away leant over the desk, his brown eye twinkling.

“Oh my god, can you not?” I asked in exasperation. “I nearly impaled my calf on a pencil pot.”

“Serves you right,” Charlie said, walking around to where I was sitting. “People are going to be walking in and it's not great for business if your manky shoes are the first thing they see.”