The State of Grace Read online

  ‘It’s perfect.’ I say the words brightly. Then I do a sort of half frown because I’m not sure that it didn’t sound a bit sharp.

  Anna gathers her orange hair in a bunch and sort of balls it in her fist, frowning, like she’s not sure where it all came from. ‘You think?’

  I nod. And Anna flashes a really sweet smile. It’s a smile that says thank you for being my friend and thank you for saying I look nice and I know that I got it right. It’s not that I don’t want to get it right, it’s just . . . God, it’s hard work being a person sometimes. I floomp down sideways on to the fluffy pillows at the head of her bed and breathe in the fake plastic smell of them, which reminds me of inflatable toys and a trip to Singapore we made when I was seven.

  ‘Grace?’

  I take my head back out of Singapore.

  ‘What about you?’

  Argh. If I’m honest I want to wear my favourite black jeans and my mum’s ancient, slightly holey Pixies T-shirt she had when she was seventeen. And my grey hoody, and my Vans-with-a-hole-in-the-toe. But I’m guessing that’s not in the rules. I might just pack the T-shirt in my bag in case I need a comfort sniff of it at the party when it all gets a bit . . . well, people-y. Parties are a bit like that, even if they don’t have Pass the Parcel and organized fun.

  Anna holds out a bright red T-shirt with a My Little Pony on the front.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ she points out helpfully, ‘and I’ve got to face the fact that I can’t wear red and must stop buying it.’ She thrusts it at me, waving it in my face.

  ‘If I wear it, it’s not going to look ironic. I’ll just look like a complete loser with a My Little Pony obsession.’

  I giggle and she throws the T-shirt at my head so I can’t see. I feel her landing on the bed beside me with a thump and a snort of laughter, which doesn’t quite mask the splintery noise of bed slats cracking in half.

  ‘Thing one,’ says my friend, removing the T-shirt from my head and throwing it, so it hurtles towards the wall. It slides out of sight behind the chest of drawers where it’ll be eaten by a million lost hair bands or move in with a family of dust bunnies. ‘You are a complete loser with a My Little Pony fetish – that’s why we’re friends. How many do you own?’

  I hide my face behind a cushion so all she can see are my eyes peeping over the top.

  ‘And thing two: slightly more urgent. We just broke the bed.’

  I can already hear Anna’s mum making her way upstairs, and they’re not the footsteps of a happy parent.

  ‘You can talk.’ I point to the row of dusty Barbie dolls that balance, their legs swinging back and forth like a line of retired Mean Girls, on top of Anna’s wardrobe. ‘At least my ponies are in a box under the bed. I keep my weird habits private.’ I stick my tongue out at Anna just as the door bangs open so hard that Harry Styles smacks against the edge of the bookcase and Anna’s dressing gown falls off the hook.

  ‘Oops, sorry. Pushed it with my foot. Do you girls want some cake?’ Anna’s mum doesn’t seem to be cross at all, weirdly. In fact, she’s wielding a plate with two fat slices of gingerbread with thick white icing on top.

  ‘Do you need to ask?’ Anna shuffles carefully forward, clearly trying not to give away the fact that the mattress underneath her is now sagging in the middle.

  ‘Darling, are you all right?’ Anna’s mum cocks her head to one side, looking at me for confirmation. ‘Grace, is she going mad? Is there something I should know about?’

  I shake my head, feeling the laughter threatening to escape, lips tightly clamped together. Sometimes when I start it’s so hard to stop and then Anna joins in and we just laugh and laugh until we’re almost sick. We got sent out of English last week for snortling with laughter over ‘Thou cream-faced loon’ in Shakespeare.

  I can feel it boiling up inside me, and any second now I’m going to start. Anna’s shoulders are beginning to shake.

  ‘It’s just –’ Anna grasps the failsafe method of shutting up all adults, at all times – ‘women’s problems.’

  ‘Ohhh,’ says Anna’s mum, with a knowing nod. ‘Definitely time for cake then, darling. D’you want some paracetamol or something?’

  ‘NoI’mfine,’ says Anna in a rush, as the bed gives another warning creak.

  ‘All right. Let me know if you want anything.’

  And she pulls the door closed as she backs out of the room, brow wrinkled in an expression of bemusement, half shaking her head at the weirdness of us, and we fall over on our sides and laugh and laugh until the bed finally gives way underneath us and Anna’s legs shoot upwards as her bum sinks to the floor.

  It’s a couple of hours later. I’m hovering in Anna’s kitchen, staring out of the window and talking to her cat, Michael. Anna is upstairs with her mum, who apparently has psychic powers or something because she returned half an hour later, this time without cake, but with a toolbox. She made us move the mattress into the hall whilst she fixed the broken slats in the bed frame. We were too weak with laughter to argue and we tried to make up for it by getting her a cup of tea and offering to hold pieces of equipment, but she just rolled her eyes at us and told us to sod off.

  I wonder if that’s why Anna and I are friends: because we both have the sort of mothers who just get on with stuff. Because Dad’s always worked away – he spends months balancing behind his lens waiting for the perfect photograph of an antelope doing a cartwheel (or something like that) – Mum’s always been the one who does all the stuff. She bosses us around and organizes everything and remembers appointments and buys stuff for cookery class on the way to school when I forget. Thing is, when Dad is around he’s on another planet too, holed up in his study editing hours of footage and collecting coffee cups and crisp packets. And Anna’s dad is the same – lovely, but not exactly practical. He’s an engineer, so he ought to be, really. He spends a lot of time in his office looking at very complicated pictures of stuff on his computers, which we’re not allowed to touch.

  And we both have cats with cool names, so there’s another reason why we’re friends. And then there’s our mutual interest in the mysterious Gabe Kowalski. He arrived halfway through the summer term from one of the other schools in town. Someone said he’s got A Reputation but I’m not really sure what that means. He seemed perfectly nice when he picked up Anna’s trainer – it fell out of her bag last term – and he smiled and said, ‘There you are,’ reeeeeally nicely in his lovely accent.

  Friendship is a weird sort of thing when you think about it.

  I look at the calendar on the wall above the kitchen sink, scanning the details that Anna’s mum has written in her neat, spidery black writing.

  It’d be useful for their parents if Anna and Charlotte were friends, really. ‘Lunch with Adam and Gillian,’ it says for tomorrow. They’re Charlotte’s parents. Anna hasn’t mentioned it. I know that’s not because she’s keeping it as a special secret and she’s planning on running off to be best friends with Charlotte, because Anna is one of my safe places. She’s one of the things that doesn’t move and doesn’t change. That’s a good thing.

  What’s not a good thing is standing here in the kitchen feeling faintly worried that I’m going to be in trouble because Anna broke the bed. Even though Anna’s mum’s mouth said it was fine, her face said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve got better things to do than fix this bloody bed.’

  I recognize the look. My mum gets exactly the same one on her face when we break stuff.

  ‘All sorted.’ Anna’s mum comes back into the kitchen, putting the toolbox down on the table with a thump, all the tools inside banging together in a metallic, teeth-on-edge crash. It makes me jump and another wave of anxiety rushes through my body, sending me cold from my toes to my head in a whoosh of panic.

  ‘You all right, my love?’ Anna’s mum makes her way across the wooden floor towards me, and puts her hand on my arm. I stiffen up. I don’t mean to – it’s just I’m reaching the point where everything’s just a bit too much everyth
ing and I’d like to magically be back home in bed with a heap of blankets. I shiver, even though the room is warm. I just need to get home now. Now. But I don’t say that.

  I say: ‘I’m fine.’

  I realize I’m drumming my fingers against the worktop and it probably looks like I’m impatient. It’s not that; I’m just tapping the rhythm of an ancient Beyoncé song for some reason that makes no sense, but I can’t stop it because it’s weirdly soothing. Taptaptaptap break tap tap break taptaptap.

  ‘Do you need a lift home?’ She gives my fingers a fleeting glance for the tiniest second and I notice it and hold them still. The rhythm shifts to my toes and now each one of them is beating their turn (but she can’t see that bit).

  She turns to look for Anna, who is nowhere to be seen – probably putting the bed back together. I feel super awkward all of a sudden, like my arms and legs are too big for my body and they’re going to keep growing like the magic porridge pot until they take over the whole kitchen.

  ‘Oh no, my mum’s just coming,’ I reply after a moment, realizing that I’d forgotten to say the words out loud. ‘She’s on her way back from town, said she’d pick me up on the way past.’

  The doorbell rings and Anna comes hurtling down the stairs, shouting that she’ll get it.

  ‘Graciemoo, your mum is here.’ She does a cartwheel in the hall, which makes her mum pull the sort of face I imagine mother dragons pull when their children are naughty. Her nostrils go all snorty.

  ‘Anna, will you keep that behaviour outside. For goodness sake, you’re fifteen, not five.’

  Anna flashes a grin at her mum then catches my eye as she swings on to the kitchen table, picking up an apple from the fruit bowl.

  ‘Make your mind up, Mother.’ She spoke through a mouthful of apple. ‘Yesterday you were all full of woe that I’m growing up too fast. Now you’re telling me off for being youthfully exuberant.’

  ‘You’ve broken a bed and now you’re doing acrobatics in the hall,’ she said pointedly. ‘I think under the circumstances I’m allowed to be a bit narked.’

  Her mum looks at mine and shakes her head.

  ‘These two.’ She half moves towards the kettle. ‘Got time for a cuppa before you go?’

  Mum wavers for a second.

  ‘Go on, then.’ She pulls her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I’ll text Leah, tell her we’ll be half an hour. Thanks, Lisa.’

  She sits down at the big wooden table while Lisa clatters around with coffee cups.

  ‘Have you girls been behaving?’

  Mum says this to me, but looks at Anna’s mum with that look mothers reserve for each other. I feel about seven.

  ‘They’ve been perfect angels.’ I feel a wave of love for Anna’s mum and her kind voice and her not minding that we bounced the bed in half after all. My mum snorts with laughter.

  Anna, who has been teasing Michael the cat with a feather, looks up at me, motioning towards the door with her head. We can escape.

  ‘So how long’s he gone for this time?’ Lisa slides a coffee across the table towards my mum.

  As we leave, I hear my mum telling Lisa it’ll be almost Christmas before my dad is back. She sounds distinctly unimpressed.

  ‘Come on, you,’ says Mum, an hour later.

  ‘You’ve been ages.’ I hoist myself out of the gigantic squashy sofa, plonking Michael on Anna’s lap.

  ‘And now it’s time to go. Leah’s been texting, asking where we are.’

  ‘I’ll message you,’ says Anna, waving Michael’s paw at me in farewell.

  And then we’re home. And I’ve done enough everything for today. I’ve been enough. I have literally no Graceness left to offer anyone or anything. I’m wrapped up in my fleece blanket like a burrito and it’s safe and warm and I’m watching Walking with Dinosaurs on Netflix for the fifty billionth time. I just want to sit here all evening, because then my brain might just stop whirring around. It’s like a million shooting stars flying out in different directions and I can’t make them stop and then I can’t sleep. The dinosaurs help. The beanie hat I’ve got on helps too. It sort of stops the thoughts from shooting around

  I can’t sleep. It’s after midnight, and I’ve read the whole internet and I’ve had a shower and watched so many trashy American TV shows that my brain is beginning to melt, and I’m starving.

  As I’m creeping down the stairs, trying not to wake anyone up, I realize there’s a noise coming from the sitting room. I open the door to find Mum. She’s sitting on the couch in her pyjamas, and Nirvana is on old-people-MTV, and there’s a bottle of red wine three-quarters drunk by her side. She looks up, head cocked to hold her mobile phone in place under her ear and beams at me, fuzzily.

  ‘Hello, darling. I’m just rediscovering my lost youth.’

  She giggles as presumably someone on the end of the phone says something. ‘Shh,’ she says to them, waving a hand pointlessly.

  ‘You OK?’ She looks at me, quizzically.

  ‘Fine.’ Withnail is curled up on a fluffy tartan blanket at Mum’s feet and the fire is still glowing from earlier. I like it when the fire’s lit – it makes the house feel alive somehow, like it’s got a personality. ‘Just getting food.’

  She nods, and turns back to the television and her phone as I withdraw.

  I had no idea she could get Dad on the phone from Greenland, but I can’t think who else she’d be talking to at this time of night. The floor’s freezing, so I sit on the kitchen worktop as I wait for the toast, shoving over a heap of Mum’s paperwork as I do so. She doesn’t work, but the voluntary stuff she does with the local autism support group takes over her entire life. Maybe she was talking to one of her cronies from there.

  The toaster pops, and I stop thinking about anything else apart from melty butter deliciousness.

  I’ll clear the mess up in the morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to be one of those people who sleep until midday at the weekend. At six in the morning our kitchen is silent, apart from the pop and click of the kettle switching off and the fizz of instant coffee as I fill the flask.

  Screwing the lid on tightly, I shove it in my rucksack and hitch it over one shoulder. I’m sure they’ll know where I am – I’m a creature of habit, after all – but I’m getting better at this stuff, so I leave a note, scrawled on the back of an envelope, lying next to the toaster on a heap of last night’s crumbs, which I’ve forgotten to clear up, but never mind.

  I pull the door behind me and my bike clatters down the front steps, as if eager to get away. It’s a funny sort of half-light at this time of the morning and the town feels like it doesn’t quite belong to anyone – night has handed it over, but daytime isn’t quite here yet and there’s only me, and the almost-silent whirring of the milk float that’s waiting outside the houses opposite.

  And then I’m in the yard and everything is forgotten. The stables are a sanctuary. The routine – the way every day is the same, no matter what’s going on in the outside world – is part of why I love it here. I throw my rucksack down in the tack room and pick up the kettle, shaking it from side to side. It’s still warm – Polly must be here already. I’ll have a coffee when I get back from the field.

  Mabel’s there, as if she read my mind. I reach across the fence, holding my hand out, palm flat, feeling the velvet whiskeryness of her muzzle as she softly sniffs me hello. I don’t bother putting on a lead rein or a halter when there’s nobody around to tell me off – she doesn’t need it. I open the gate and she slips through gracefully, one ear flicking backwards as she senses the other members of the herd looking up.

  Together, side by side, we walk up to the yard, her hooves clipping precisely as we step from the earth of the track on to the concrete. I open the door to her stable and she steps inside.

  When I’m with Mabel, everything melts away. I forget about the coffee. I brush her silver-grey mane until each strand shines like spun silk. When sh
e’s groomed, I shove her grooming kit back in the cupboard under the feeding trough and pull out her saddle and bridle, tacking her up quickly. I want to be out while it’s still early, before the rest of the world comes alive, and we make it, a plaintive whinny from Mabel’s best friend, Harry, sounding out across the field as we disappear from sight.

  There’s nothing in the pink silence of the morning but a gentle clinking as Mabel chews on her snaffle bit. We turn down on to the bridle path, startling a hare, which stops front paws in mid-air, before shooting off into the hedgerow. The leaves are sparkling with dew, my breath and Mabel’s puffing in clouds as the thin sun breaks through the clouds.

  Spring and autumn are my favourite times to be outside. And winter, when it’s cold and the sitting room is full of the sparkly darkness of fairy lights and candles on the fireplace. But not summer. Summer’s too obvious, too yellow, too shiny and easy to please. It doesn’t have to try too hard and everyone just loves it anyway.

  We’re as one, Mabel and me. Her ears are pricked forward, questing, the dark grey tips curving in towards each other, her mane flying gracefully, neck curved in an arc. The repetitive rhythm of the trot has me counting one-two-one-two like Penny, my riding instructor, used to when I was seven and having lessons. I realize I’m muttering it under my breath as we reach the top of the little hill.

  The trees here have been sawn away by the forestry workers, exposing circles of startled pale wood, the ground still blanketed with fallen needles. I pull Mabel to a stop and slide off, hooking her reins round my hand. I’ve got a packet of mints and I’m training her to take one from my mouth. I balance the sweet between my lips and she reaches out gently, her mushroom-soft top lip catching it and knocking it to the ground. She hoovers it up instantly. We’re working on it.