Broken Soup. Jenny Valentine
I’m starving.”
And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her.
I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma carried on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me too.
Believe it or not, school was one of my favourite places back then. Everywhere else seemed like hard work, so school was a distraction. I didn’t have to worry about where Stroma was. I didn’t have to handle Mum. I didn’t have to think about the obvious unless I wanted to.
The gap Jack left there got filled pretty quickly by someone else clever and good at running and a bit of a flirt. It was like a day off. Because of course that didn’t happen at home. There was no room for anything else. I sometimes thought that if Jack was looking down on us all, he’d be feeling majorly hassled, not free to enjoy the afterlife at all.
I think Mum and Dad drove each other crazy with it in the end. They stopped talking altogether about three months before Dad moved out. There was this odd, loaded quiet around them. We kept out of their way.
Maybe they split up because of Jack, because when they looked at each other they only saw him.
Maybe they blamed one another for stuff.
Maybe they were headed that way already. Maybe him dying kept them together a bit longer. I have no idea.
When Dad finally came clean about leaving, he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. He’d been staying on sofas for a while, pretending he was at the office, basically avoiding us. He needn’t have bothered to pluck up the courage to break old news. Even Stroma had worked that one out, aged five.
He was gone a long time before he was gone, if you know what I mean. And when he left, things just got worse. Because we had him to miss too.
So anyway, school was like a holiday, if you can imagine that.
I don’t know how I’d overlooked Bee there before, because after that day she spoke to me, she was the first face I saw in any crowd. It didn’t matter who I was with, I’d suddenly be aware that she was around. It was like a special light went on that made her easy to find.
The thing is, once you start looking at Bee you almost have to tell yourself to stop. We aren’t so different on paper: same height, same colouring maybe, at a stretch. But Bee has something I don’t. Her skin and hair are different shades of the same honey. The way she holds herself is so precise and effortless and graceful I still wonder how she does it. And it isn’t just me who thinks that. I see other people watching her all the time, trying to work out how come they aren’t put together the same way Bee is.
It was after school the next time I bumped into her and she acted all surprised, but I had this quiet feeling she’d been waiting for me. I had to pick up Stroma and Bee said did we want to get an ice cream or something.
We went to this place at the top of Chalk Farm Road that’s been there forever. They sell cones out of a window on the street or you can go in and have sundaes in tall glasses and scoops in a silver cup. Stroma sat on Bee’s lap, even though there were about thirty-nine free chairs in there. She was chatting away about some boy in her class called Carl Dean who cut a hole in his shirt on purpose, with scissors, because he needed that exact colour for his collage. She was making us laugh without even trying.
I’d been remembering the birthday party we had there, me and Jack, when he was nine and I was seven. I thought about all the kids who’d come and where they were now, and if any of them remembered Jack or knew he was dead or even minded. I was wondering which chair he had sat on then, and if it was the one I was sitting on now.
It was cool and quiet and empty in the shop. I saw a crowd from my class go past the window, yelling, dancing, drawing attention to themselves. Another day that would’ve been me, but right then I was glad to be hidden away at a marble table with a girl who said things I hadn’t heard ten times before. We finished off Stroma’s mint choc chip when she’d had enough. Bee tried to make an origami swan out of her napkin and failed. We looked at the pictures on the wall – signed photos of celebrities nobody’d ever heard of. When the waitress took Stroma off to get more free wafers, Bee asked me if I’d thought any more about the negative.
I hadn’t, not at all. It took me a second just to work out what she was on about. She seemed interested, so I said I was going to get it printed, just out of curiosity, to see what it was. I wanted to say the right thing so I could spend more time around her. I knew it would still be in Jack’s bin because I was the only one who did the rubbish, Tuesday nights. And that was the only thing in his bin anyway, we never used it. Still, I was thinking I’d just get another negative if that one had somehow disappeared. It’s not like she would ever know.
After a bit she said, “If you want to print it I can help you. I know how to do that stuff.”
It was nice the way she said it, not pushy, and she said I could bring Stroma, so I said OK.
We went to her house later in the week. Bee lived with her dad and her little brother in a top floor flat on the Ferdinand Estate, with a playground out the front and a view across London. The walkway outside her front door was lined with geraniums and daisies. You could see the Telecom Tower. Bee’s dad was called Carl and he had overgrown pale hair and sunken cheeks, and you just knew by looking at him that he played the guitar. Her brother was about two. He was wandering around with a snoopy T-shirt and no pants on, which cracked Stroma up straightaway. He had hair the same colour as Carl’s, but all matted and curly.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said.
“You don’t know much about me at all,” she said, smiling. “We just met.”
We watched the chubby little back of him padding down the hall, Stroma close behind, fussing over him like a sheepdog.
“What’s his name?”
“Sonny.”
Carl took Stroma and Sonny off to the kitchen to make jam tarts. Stroma couldn’t stop giggling. I thought her knees might buckle with the joy of it.
Bee was turning out cupboards in the bathroom. She said it would be much quicker to scan the negative into Photoshop and get an image straight up on screen, but she didn’t have a scanner and anyway she printed photos in the bath because it was how Carl had taught her and it was all his equipment. She said the old-fashioned way was better because she liked the not knowing, the time things took to happen. The taps were on and she had her head under the sink. She was talking to me about this thing called the Slow Movement, which seemed to mean baking your own bread instead of nipping out for it to the nearest shop, and making lunch take all day, and getting a boat and a train and another boat instead of flying, because the journey is everything, not just a way of getting from one place to another. She was telling me this stuff I’d never considered and I hadn’t even taken my coat off, but I think I got most of it. Bee’s brain is as precise and quick and extraordinary as the rest of her, the way she has you look at things.
While I was waiting around, I picked up a book and started leafing through it. One of the photos inside was the first ever photo, Bee said. It was taken more than a hundred and fifty years ago by a Frenchman called Daguerre. She said in those days they had these huge plate cameras and everybody had to sit still for ages if they wanted their picture to come out. They had these special headrests that you clamped yourself in to