All the Good Things Read online

As I walked towards the lift, I saw two short, solid legs and a head of grey curls. It was the coach! It was definitely the coach. It was another sign that I was in the right place, that if I just –

  Except it wasn’t the coach.

  It was another woman.

  She was wearing a bright red ‘Running for Fun’ T-shirt, the ‘Fun’ stretched by her boobs, which were so bouncy that despite telling myself not to stare at them because that’s exactly what pervy guys do, I could only stare at them. When I pulled my eyes away, I saw she was smiling at me. We stood side by side in the lift and then we got out at the same floor and walked in the same direction down the hall. I didn’t turn around to look at her when I reached my room, but I could still feel her smile; it was a good feeling, and I breathed it as deep as I could.

  My hotel room was clean and white. The sheets were tucked into the mattress, the ironing board folded up against the wall, so there was no way of knowing who’d stayed here before. Lying on the bed, it was easy to fool myself I was back at the hospital, about to get my twenty-week scan, my heart yammering right up into my mouth as I waited for them to tell me you were a girl. Maybe your dad was about to walk in with a hot takeaway pizza. Or a hot water bottle. Maybe I’d finally found the button that said reset.

  This maybe-I’m-not-so-bad feeling was shattered, a few moments later, by a knock at the door.

  The knock I’d been waiting for my whole life, even before I did the bad thing.

  But it wasn’t the police; it was Mrs Bounce.

  ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you? I couldn’t help noticing you in the lift, so lovely and fresh and in those starry leggings, and I thought we might squeeze in a run before the reception what do you think don’t you think it will be fun? Fun, you know like . . .’ She pointed to the cracked-up word across her boobs, then laughed like this was the world’s No. 1 joke.

  I could tell she was a good and normal person but I could also tell that if we spent much time together, she’d piss me off, and then she’d know that underneath my leggings I wasn’t lovely or fresh or any other good thing. I didn’t belong in this club. But better to be in the club for a while, than not at all, so I said yes, what a great idea.

  ‘Brilliant!’

  When we were outside the hotel, she bounced on the spot while waving her phone in my face. ‘I’ve already mapped a route. Ten miles – up the canal, around a meadow and back. Is that OK with you? Which running app do you use?’

  ‘I don’t use an app. I just run.’

  For a second, she stopped bouncing. ‘That’s incredible.’

  Have you ever been to Leicester? Perhaps you have. I imagine you with your new mum and your new dad living somewhere like this. Somewhere which is halfway between crowded and empty, between posh and skanky. A nice, normal place. A place where people looked at me and saw a lovely, fresh runner, not a woman who’d done a 100% TM certified bad thing. Mrs Bounce kept smiling back at me, chatting and pointing out a sign to the remains of Richard III – ‘They found him under a car park, can you believe that!’

  ‘Whoa!’ As we reached a big road, Mrs Bounce stuck her arm out just in time to stop a Greggs lorry slicing off my nose.

  ‘Didn’t you see it?’

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Need to catch up on some sleep?’

  ‘Umm . . .’ It was then, watching her bounce while we waited for the Green Man, that I realized the time between doing the bad thing and buying new clothes and a new haircut in that Milton Keynes shopping centre was a blank.

  ‘I can’t remember when I last slept through the night.’

  ‘Poor thing. Got a lot on your mind?’

  Finally, the Green Man beeped and we ran across the road and down some olden days wonky steps to the canal towpath, and I don’t know if it was because the sky was scattered in the water or because water always calms me, or because my ears were still ringing with the Green Man’s beep, fooling me that now was a safe time, but I told her about you.

  ‘I had a baby a few months ago. A little girl. She doesn’t really get sleep.’

  ‘A few months?’ Mrs Bounce stared at my belly, whose you-shaped bump had long since been gobbled up by the rest of me, because, for reasons I won’t go into just now, I’d had a bit of a bust-up with food.

  ‘You must have one of those amazing metabolisms. Lucky for some. Or did you start running soon after the birth?’

  If she’d asked me this when we were standing still, I’d have freaked out. But when you run, you reach a point where even your toes know that your body is a good place to be. The real you rises up, and your thoughts are as blurred as the ducks on the canal and the half-built luxury apartments and the windowless old factories, or whatever else it is you’re running past; you’re free.

  ‘After the birth, I just wanted to lie in bed and hold her, you know? Sniff her head for hours on end.’

  ‘I know! That smell! Gemma, she’s my first, they got her out by caesarean and I could barely get out of bed for weeks. She wouldn’t forgive me for bringing her into this world – what a cryer!’

  ‘Mine’s a cryer, too.’

  ‘Don’t worry – she’ll grow up to be a right character. Just like Gemma! You know, it was my mum that got me through it; she set up camp in the spare room. I was dead set against it, but in retrospect, I’m grateful; it’s a stressful, scary time, having a new baby, especially the first baby, and between you and me, I doubt our marriage would have continued without her . . .’

  In what her running app told us was 10.23 miles, I learned that she had two girls, one husband; one mother (alive), one father (dead) and two brothers (also dead); two cats, three dogs (one alive, two dead), five rabbits (one alive, four dead) and an uncertain number of stick insects. Her youngest girl was on a mission to make the cat love the dog, and the rabbits were forever spitting carrots at each other. She wanted to run a marathon on every continent before she turned fifty. Her husband told her she was bonkers before massaging her feet every night.

  All I did was smile and nod and say ‘no way’ and ‘wow’ and ‘cool’ when she paused for breath. I put one foot in front of the other, and the ground disappeared, and I breathed right down to the place where I can’t usually be arsed to breathe, and I tried my best not to breathe out all the things she was telling me. I guess I must’ve started to believe her life was somehow mine, because when we were back at the start of the canal, stretching out, and she said, ‘So, where’s your little one now? Bonding with her daddy?’ I snapped.

  Sweat was sticking my clothes to my skin, making me shiver. Mrs Bounce’s words rolled round and round my head. All the good things and the so-what things and even the bad things drained out of me. I imagined pushing her in the canal, her splashing around like some supersize fluorescent fish. That couldn’t happen.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Sorry.’

  I set off but empty spread right through me until I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe; after a few steps, I had to stop and bend over.

  ‘Are you OK? Dizzy? Sit down.’ Gently, she pushed me on to the ground. I plunged my head between my legs and, pebble by pebble by kicked-in cider can, the towpath returned.

  ‘Sorry. I blacked out.’

  ‘No need to apologize.’ She frowned. Then her face twisted with worry, which reminded me of Chantelle, who was the last person to look worried about me, and also one of the last ones I wanted to think about just then. ‘When was the last time you ate something?’

  ‘Ummm . . .’ But I was too empty to make anything else up. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She pulled a protein flapjack out of her bum bag and pressed it into my hands. ‘Eat this. I was sceptical of them at first, but the company kept sending me free samples, and I have to say, they got me hooked.’

  The flapjack was squished. It was big and heavy and it scared me.

  ‘Go on.’

  I nibbled it. It tasted a bit like blood. Like metal.

  The voice, the bad one,
that comes and goes whenever it wants, it whispered: You don’t need this. You don’t need food. All you need is to keep moving.

  But Mrs Bounce and her smile and the worry-wrinkles in her forehead, they helped me to ignore it. I nibbled some more. And some more. A bit more. Until it was gone.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes.’ But I didn’t feel better, not exactly. I felt complicated. Complicated was an especially scary thing to feel right then.

  ‘I’ve got a spare ticket for the VIP area,’ she said, when we were almost back at the hotel. ‘My husband was meant to join me but things between us haven’t exactly been easy, and anyway, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. Would you like to join me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Wonderful! I’ll knock for you after we’re rested and showered up.’

  I love showers; I love how the water scalds you all over like a too-tight hug. But Mrs Bounce’s flapjack was filling me up, and not just with energy – with memories from down under the sofa. Getting to know her would only make both of our lives worse. I picked up my bag and, before there was any chance of another knock at the door, I walked out of the hotel without knowing where I was going or why. As soon as reception was out of sight, I broke into a run.

  3. When two people love each other enough to share silence

  Writing about the good things is hard, because sooner or later you get to the edge, and if you’re not careful, you fall off.

  ‘Then look over,’ said Erika. ‘Hold on tight, so you don’t fall. Take a good look. Write down what you see.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  She said the point was to ‘integrate’ the good with everything else.

  ‘Not being rude,’ I said, ‘but WTF does that mean?’

  She pushed her glasses up her nose and said, ‘It means absorbing one’s flaws into the hole.’

  I asked which kind of hole, the kind with the w or the kind without, because if she was talking about the w kind, like wholemeal bread from Waitrose, she was having a laugh because that kind of whole was never going to have a thing to do with me. As for the other kind . . . ‘Why is this making you angry?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ I said. ‘I’m just . . .’ But tears clogged my throat and I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say that as well as being angry, I was sad.

  Erika just sat there, like a stone, which only pushed me further over the edge of good, because what I’m used to are normal human beings, i.e. ones who shout back or – if they had been sitting where Erika was sitting – throw their titchy plastic cup of water over my head. I don’t know why she didn’t do any of these things, but she didn’t, and eventually, I opened my mouth and there were no words, no scream, no bad things left.

  Still, she said nothing.

  I said nothing.

  She scratched one dry hand with the other. I recrossed my legs. She licked her lips. We shared some more nothing.

  I don’t know how long it lasted, this silence, but I’ll tell you now: it was good. It was so good that when I stood up to leave, I finally asked the one thing I’d been wanting to ask since we met: ‘Erika, why don’t you just get some rubber gloves?’

  She laughed. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Your hands. They’re kind of mank.’ She said nothing, so I added: ‘No offence.’

  ‘You know, my husband says the same thing. But I never get around to it. There’s always something else to do.’

  ‘That’s bad, Erika. One of the first things I did when I moved into my own place was buy some washing-up gloves.’

  She smiled at me with one eye, glanced at her watch with the other. I wanted her to tell me more about her husband. Her sink. Her life. Instead she said, ‘You’ll have to tell me all about it next week.’

  The first person to breathe the same silence as me was Paul. Paul was Foster Dad No.1. He was Foster Dad No.1 in that he was the first one I had, but also the best one. He picked me up from school every single day. ‘You won’t forget?’ I’d ask him. He’d laugh and tell me he’d made a promise and he was going to keep it. Sure enough he was always at the school gates when the bell rang, a smile spreading out from under his grey mop of hair.

  On our way home, he’d ask about my day, and even though he’d most probably had a call from some teacher listing my latest bad deeds, when I spun him some BS about winning a prize for my proper realistic drawing of a rabbit, or getting the highest mark in a spelling test, he’d just smile and nod and say, ‘Is that so?’

  Then he’d point at a poster of a missing cat that wasn’t there the day before, or if it was we hadn’t noticed, and why was that, he wanted to know. What happened to the cat? And, he’d add, pointing to a real cat sunning its fat ginger belly on the paving stones, what was it like to be the cat who wasn’t missing? And I’d say maybe the cat sunning its belly had eaten the missing cat, its belly was pretty big after all, or maybe the missing cat had just stopped loving its owners and found some better ones, e.g. ones who lived in a mansion with a swimming pool and an ice cream machine, somewhere fun and sunny, like Spain? Because why else would people leave other people? How could they?

  When I said things like that, Paul’s eyes got big and sad, but then he’d grab my hand and say why didn’t we pop into Happy Shopper and he’d buy me a treat, anything I wanted, and I’d go into the shop, but it didn’t make me happy, there were too many flavours of crisps and chocolate and sweets, and then there were other weird things like Mini Cheddars, and eventually he would say, hurry up now, just hurry up and choose, and I could see that he was getting angry, and I knew that when people got angry they didn’t want to be near other people, and so I’d grab whatever was nearest, even if I didn’t like it.

  When we got home, Paul would do a few more hours of work and I’d sit at a mini desk at the other side of his office and, with the coloured paper and felt tips and fine liners and pencils and crayons he was forever buying me, I’d transform whatever we had or hadn’t talked about on our walk home into a story. I’d try to make it like the books at school; neat smiling people and neat smiling words. Except the words always came out jumbled and the colours spilled over the edges of the things or the people they were meant to be. When I showed them to Paul, he’d say they were brilliant. Then he’d get me to sound out the words I’d tried to write down, but I never would; it was more fun to tell him what the shapes on the page meant to me, e.g. they were everything paving stones were thinking while people walked over them or the dreams of the lost cat. My ideas always made him laugh. You’ve got a real imagination, you! A true original. I tried to breathe his words and the smiles that went with them deep inside of me, so they’d never leave.

  What I loved most was the silence; the stillness; there were things I didn’t know, like where my mum was or why she’d left me, and there were things I’d never have, like real parents in the way that everyone else had real parents, but as long as I was sat there, scribbling into my silence, with Paul a few metres away, typing and hunching and hmmming into his, it wasn’t a make-up-BS-stories-to-escape-from kind of a thing, it was good and it was special and it made me feel like I was, too.

  So why don’t you tell us why you punched that boy today?

  Why did you cheat in that test?

  Why did you swear at the teaching assistant?

  Why Why Why are you so

  bad

  bad

  BAD?

  These are the kinds of things Susie would say when she got home. Well, some she’d say, some I’d feel, but her words and my feelings got so mixed up, I wouldn’t be able to eat my dinner. When we’d fought until we couldn’t fight any more, they’d send me to bed. But they never checked if I stayed there and so I’d creep out and sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them fight about the bad thing in their lives, i.e. me.

  ‘Go easy on her,’ Paul said. ‘She’s been through a lot. Give her time.’

  ‘That’s not what the child psychologist said,’ said Susie. ‘She said that what Beth
needs is reality, and God knows, letting her string you along in her little fantasies is only going to make her worse.’

  ‘But she’s making progress.’

  ‘Progress? I don’t know if weekly calls from school count as progress.’

  ‘Give her a chance. I mean, considering . . .’

  ‘It’s hardly surprising, is it?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means this isn’t as easy as we thought . . .’

  These conversations got louder and longer and more regular; even if I stayed in bed, their voices would rumble through the air and the ceiling and the floorboards and the carpet and the mattress, to my ears. The only way to block them out was to make my own. I did this by bouncing on the bed. Susie would tell him to tell me to stop but he’d refuse, so she’d march up to my room and in this squashed-in voice that hurt ten times more than a big, honest shout, say, ‘Beth, you simply can’t do that. Now please, settle down.’

  At school, I got in trouble for bouncing, too. I’d bounce my leg under the table and some other kid would tell me to stop it and I wouldn’t and they’d groan or say that I must have the ‘crazy dog disease’, and so I’d kick them and before you knew it, we were fighting. I’d get out of my seat without asking and instead of walking to assembly, I’d run. When teachers asked whether I understood the rules, I got angry because I didn’t know how to say that there was so much noise inside of me that sometimes I couldn’t hear anything or anyone else; moving was the only way to turn it down.

  Eventually, the teacher used the word ‘hyperactive’; that’s when Paul started taking me to the park. As soon as Susie was home and defrosting chicken breasts for dinner, we’d change into shorts and T-shirt and run to the park. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought he was tricking me into an extra P.E. lesson. But running round the park wasn’t P.E. It wasn’t teams and rules and waiting for ages and ages in the cold. It was moving however you wanted. Moving as fast as your body needed. Moving until the noise in your head turned into a tune. Sometimes it even felt like my real mum was the one singing the tune, and knowing this didn’t make me feel sad or angry or strange; it made me feel tingly and good. Paul never tried to talk to me while we were running round the park, but the way he smiled, I knew that he was inside his own tune, and he could see that I was in mine, and he was glad.